The restaurant I picked to relate Chitalian’s website is Olive Garden and Hunan. Chitalian is the fusion between Italian and Chinese, therefore I thought best to have critique two restaurants instead of just one. The critiques that will be given are on color scheme, texture and navigation. All three of these critiques give us a feel for what the restaurant is about.

Let’s first start with color scheme. For Olive Garden, their color scheme is yellow, and white with a hint of brown in there. The Color scheme of the website is an analogous scheme, which is choosing colors that are right next to one another.  Yellow is the main color for the website, again showing the happiness of the restaurant. For the whole background of the website, it is a darkened yellow, it’s not too bright that hurt your eyes. Having the background that one color can show off the enjoyment customers have while at Olive Garden. White is the second main color, which some people would think of just being plain and boring, because white is a background color for many things. The white color shows off Italy as a pure and perfect country, it definitely shows off the simple beauty the Italian culture has.

Hunan Chinese Restaurant’s color scheme is complementary, by having colors that are opposite of one another. The main color that they have chosen for their site is green. Thinking of the color green, many will go straight to nature, whether its trees or grass or even flowers. Putting together brown and green would be more as nature rather than black and green, which can be techier. Yet, green can show off as freshness and wealthy as well. I like them choosing green because Chinese tends to be fresher because they use a lot of herbs and seafood for their foods. Also, they show off by being wealthy because China is a wealthy country overall.  Hunan’s also have white, which can show off pureness to how the restaurant is. The only way the color scheme is complementary is because for the text they highlighted some of it with a red color.

Moving onto texture, Olive Garden choose to have a rustic look to their website. The whole background has the texture of being an old wall from a random building in Italy. The logo itself looks like being on a weathered piece of parchment. Since the logo and the background are close to the same color the logo has a shadow behind it. That seems to be the only texture from the website, because each page is just plain and simple with black text and a white background. I mean each page is clean looking with the white background and text, that doesn’t make it hard to see what is on each page.

Hunan’s Chinese restaurant has no texture whatsoever. The only texture I see from the website is a small container that has a light green background with a white design. Then the only picture they have is of the inside of the restaurant, and the there is a white border around it with a drop shadow effect. The book, Principles of Beautiful Web Design, mentions that eliminating texture might just establish the websites own personality and character. Where I guess with them having no texture they show off how clean and proper their restaurant is.

The last part is navigation, which is important because in the book, Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug, he mentions that navigation puts a ground under our feet or gives us handrails to hold on. Krug also says there are five ways to keep navigation consistent. One is “a way home,” which means that the website always needs a home button. Olive Gardens way to get to the homepage is their logo, you just click on the logo saying Olive Garden in the top left corner. Hunan’s has a Home tab in the navigation bar and clicking on the title of the restaurant will take you back. Second is to have “a way to search.” Olive Garden does have a search box to find a restaurant that is near the customer. On the other hand, Hunan’s is missing a search box. Therefore, it would be difficult to search anything specific. Third is to keep the website’s identification. If someone keeps clicking on tabs from a site and then don’t see a logo or name they will wonder how they got out of the page so quickly. Now for Olive Garden and Hunan’s they both keep their ID’s on each of their pages, therefore no customer gets lost. Fourth is to have sections, which are the primary navigation to main sections. Olive Garden has plenty of sections from each main section. For example the Recipes section can be clicked on and goes to have choices for beverages, appetizers, main dishes, desserts, pizza, sauces, side dishes, vegetables and soup. Those sub sections help look more specifically to what the customer wants. Hunan’s has no sub section for main section.  Each section just has all the content right on the page. Finally, the last one is Utilities those link important elements that aren’t really part of the content hierarchy. If you want to buy a gift card from Olive Garden it’ll take you to a page to submit your payment for the gift card. They also have a site map where you click where you are from and it takes you to that specific cities website and specials. Hunan’s just has a site map that gives a Google maps image and you click on it to show directions on how to get there. Each website shows their unique personalities for their restaurant and both show easy and simple navigations through their sites.

Now onto Chitalian’s website of color, texture and navigation. Chitalian’s colors are mainly red, green, white and black, and a tint of yellow. The red, green, and white show off each cultures flag. The Chinese flag is red and yellow and the Italian flag is red, green and white. Therefore the common color for both is red. The color red can mean passionate and dramatic, showing how passionate of this new idea for food style and dramatic because the food styles are from the completely two different countries. Also, the hint of yellow adds in some happiness, allowing the viewer see that the owners are happy to try this new fusion. Like Olive Garden, the yellow isn’t too bright that will scare away the customers. Now, the two main colors would be red and green, which can be scary, because when I think of red and green I think of Christmas colors and the holidays coming up. Yet, Chitalian doesn’t show that at all, the colors are not as bright to have a sense of a holiday theme. Chitalian right away has texture right in the background. The texture looks more of wood, which can show the nature of the Chinese culture and a cooking style to the Italian culture. The flag on the homepage has some depth in the actual image. The title Chitalian seems to be cut into the image, by showing the shadows in the actual text. Another little texture from the website is for each page, the title of the page has a light gray container behind it. You can’t really notice it, but to add some depth to it, there could have been a drop shadow from the container, to make the border pop out a little more. The drop shadow would help as well to not make it a two dimensional image but a three dimensional one instead.

Chitalian out stands both Olive Garden and Hunan is because there is versatility. The difference between Chitalian and Olive Garden that Chitalian is more clean cut then Olive Garden, there is a simple and clean font with a clean background. It is not too challenging to navigate through the website, there are not too many tabs that could take you away from the website. Unlike Olive Garden you could easily just click through a million tabs and then easily get lost. The difference between Chitalian and Hunan is that Hunan is too basic. Again Chitalian has a texture background to give a to give some versatility and have it interesting to look out. Customers would like the website because of the simplicity of the navigation and the interesting look of the website itself.