Review 4

For my final review, I decided to choose the website www.awlins.com.  It is the site for the A.W. Lin’s restaurant that serves a fusion of Chinese, Sushi, and Thai cuisine.  To start off, the layout of A.W. Lin’s is very typical of other restaurant sites. On the main menu page, it features a top navigation bar with their logo to the top left.  Then as you move down, there is a title area. In this area there is a static photo of food with a box of type featuring the restaurant name and also a summary of the style of food they make.  This title section is a nice touch, helping users like me who have never heard of the restaurant before, have a general knowledge of their food. It is something our site lacks currently but after seeing it I will add.  The rest of the navigation consists of slideshows and noticeable buttons to take throughout the site. The sites menus feature the consistent static photo with title at the top with a centered list of menu items. This list of items is clear and noticeable but becomes very boring when scrolling through.  This gets me to the color portion. The color pallete consists of white, brown and several shades of red. While the the red and brown have a big contrast on the white background with helps with navigation buttons, it becomes boring in a few spots throughout the site. One of the things I might add to the site would be the use of texture.  A.W. Lin’s has very little, if any use of texture in the site. With its plain white background and bars of colors the site has no texture at all through the site. I would likely add a subtle background texture to the white and also add more of a textured line to the thin rules that separate sections of the layout. The navigation of the site is very consistent of many restaurants.  The global navigation consists of menu, order now, private dining, gift cards, locations, promotions, and news. These sections I believe clearly order the content in a logical manner except for the gift cards page. The gift cards page is very small only having a line of text saying you can buy a card at the store which I believe to be unnecessary for it to have its own global navigation section.  This restaurant has many items on the menu and also seems to focus on ordering take out and delivery which makes it necessary for the full menu to be available. Therefore with all the menu items, the site broke the menu into five sections with a drop down bar on the global navigation. I think this is necessary for this site specifically because of emphasis of ordering from the phone and its large menu.  Lastly, while I believe the site can effectively guide a user through the content, I think there are a few places where the user could become confused. With the contrast of the site, the user can clearly find what is clickable and what is not, I believe there are some places on the main menu where a user can ask “Why is this button here?” Overall the site has an effective contrast use that helps with navigation, the overall design feels boring to me with its lack of texture and interesting features.  A.W. Lin’s site did point out things like a main menu title that I need to add to our fusion site, but I believe overall our fusion website will be more effective with more use of texture and photography to interest our users and make them starving for out food. Our sites navigation will also be smaller, taking bigger logical chunks of content to put on each button of the global navigation bar. This I believe will help the user navigate to the page they need to be on much more than that of A.W. Lin’s.