When a local restaurant decides to advertise online through a website, the site needs to be designed effectively with plenty of informative content, as this will help bring new and returning customers into your business. I chose to review and compare sites for No. 9 Park, an Italian/French restaurant in Boston, and Six Penn Kitchen, an American bistro in downtown Pittsburgh. Both of these businesses are marketing, in a sense, the same product, but are designed very differently.
When considering the balance of each layout, the No. 9 Park site has more of an asymmetrical balance, with the navigation on the left side and the content on the right. In contrast, the Six Penn Kitchen site has a symmetrical format, with the navigation centered at the top around the centered logo, and the content below follows suit.
Both sites incorporate a great use of unity throughout. When you look at the No. 9 Park site, the likeness of headlines, content and rules from page to page create a very unified look. You can tell that each page belongs to the same site. The same goes for the Six Penn Kitchen site with the same fonts and colors being used throughout, as well as like borders around all of the images. Both sites also utilize the idea of persistent navigation, which, as described in Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think Revisited,” is a set of navigation elements that appear in the same place on every page of a site and create a consistent look throughout.
When you are trying to market a business, I believe that emphasis should primarily be on the identity itself. The company logo and navigation should really jump out and be the first thing you see, and keep going back to. Usually, and in the case of both of these sites, it is also a link back to the home page, which is very important. In Krug’s book, the home page is described as being like the North Star, where a simple click will lead you back to a fresh start. The Six Penn Kitchen site really showcases a good example of effective emphasis, by putting a contrasting white banner at the top of all of the pages, and placing the identity/link smack dab in the center, you really can’t help but see it. With the No. 9 Park site, the logo/link is placed well and it is large with contrasting colors and the navigation is in a predictable location, but I feel that the images used in the site are a little intense and kind of take precedence.
As I mentioned briefly before in discussing the balance, both sites are laid out very differently but effectively. Navigation placement is very important in the design of a good website. As Krug describes in the aforementioned book, navigation should be placed in a standard place, so that the viewer can locate it quickly and painstakingly. No. 9 Park uses the predictable left side navigation, with the content to the right, while Six Penn Kitchen chose to position the navigation at the top, with the content to follow underneath, another efficient layout technique.
In comparing the sites for No. 9 Park and Six Penn Kitchen, I gravitate more towards the latter. Both sites have a solid use of the design principles listed above, except for maybe the lack of emphasis in the No. 9 Park site. This one for me is primarily based on personal preference, and I like the use of symmetrical balance, the color choices and the structure of the Six Penn Kitchen site.