My final project, along with Justin and Milt, was a website for a small, family-owned, fictional restaurant called Hole in the Wall. To go along with this theme of hole in the wall/mom & pop style restaurants, I looked at the website for my favorite local dive: Gab ‘N Eat, in Carnegie, PA.
My first impression of the website was fairly positive. The color choices are warm and inviting, and remind me of coffee (which is perfect for a place whose primary seller is breakfast food). The gradient that flanks the page on both sides is also a nice touch, helping to break up the white of the page. The gradient also gives a sense of fluid movement, drawing the viewer’s eyes down the page.
As far as texture goes, this site does not make much use of it. Apart from the textures of the food in the various images, there really is no noticeable use of texture. As a regular at this place, I can tell you that there are a whole boatload of interesting textures that can be found within the actual restaurant (the wood grain of the tables and counter, the paneling of the walls, etc.). I feel as though the designer of the site either ignored the opportunities they had to utilize texture, or they were just too lazy to do so. Either way, the site could certainly benefit from it.
The overall simplicity of the site seemed at first very fitting to me, as Gab ‘N Eat is a very simple restaurant. There’s no fancy food on the menu, there are no reservations, and there certainly isn’t a dress code. Everything is hand made, the old school way. The place is still cash-only, in fact. This simplicity was immediately recognizable on the site. Normally, I would say that’s a good thing. In this case, however, I think the simplicity of the site is a bit of a detriment. After about 10 seconds of browsing, it becomes clear that the site has only one page. On one hand, this simplifies the viewing experience for the user: everything they need to know about the place is neatly arranged on a single page. The navigation of the page is thus reduced to a minor amount of vertical scrolling and eye movement. As much as this simplifies the navigation, I think it takes away from the site’s content. There just simply is not that much content on the page. When people go online to view a restaurant’s menu, they want instant gratification. This site has links to download Gab ‘N Eat’s menu, but no way of seeing the menu within the page. By including the menu this way, the designer is making the viewer open up another application or window just to see what they came for, and that can alienate or annoy someone.
In comparing this site to the one that Justin, Milt, & myself have created, I have to say that ours definitely stands out. Part of our plan for the design was to keep it simple, and we succeeded in doing that. The color choices are simple, we used a simple image of a textured wall for our background, and navigating the site is intuitive. I won’t claim that our site is perfect, but I am quite confident in saying that it is far beyond that of Gab ‘N Eat.
Check out Gab ‘N Eat’s website at http://www.gabneat.com/