I chose Patron’s Mexican Grill’s website http://www.patronmexicangrills.com to compare with our final restaurant design. I specifically chose Patron’s because we are trying to give our site a more Mexican cultural feel while trying to keep it clean and simple. Patron’s use of color and texture really tie in the over all feel that we are looking for. The green, orange and yellow are similar to our color scheme. However I think the incorporation of magenta as the footer of the site and navy blue in the logo do not work well with the overall theme. While the colors follow the typical theme of a Mexican restaurant I think they should’ve stuck to a solid 3 or 4 colors to tie the whole site together. Instead they used a total of 11 colors that make the color scheme seem ill thought out and almost collaged.
As far as the layout goes, there are side bars that are texturized which overall helps add a sense of legitimacy. This texture works well in the overall sense, however I do not think a texture of a similar sort would work well on my final restaurant site. The center column which holds all the information works well and makes navigation a little easier as your eye isn’t distracted over the whole page. The only aspect that doesn’t work that well was one particular bar used to divide sections which extends past the center banner. Given that no other of the dividers do this, it looks out of place.
The overall navigation on the page works well. Everything flows seamlessly. The navigation bar and the buttons are easy enough to locate since they are at the top of the page with easy transition between each different button. Because it is a restaurant site, it lacks some of the normal elements most websites hold including a tag line and welcome blurb. This being because all that information is included within the logo.
While Patron’s website is still navigable and easy to read, it lacks an overall brand. With our final restaurant page we are doing our best to make sure the site works well as a whole, through our color scheme, graphics, and type. We stuck to a color scheme of 3 colors and chose a more simplistic approach to make sure it looks clean. We want the overall appearance to give off the image of our restaurant as being clean, organized, and accessible.