The two burger chain websites I have chosen to review are White Castle and Sonic. Comparing the visual hierarchy, Sonic has a very strong emphasis on photos that customers upload to the site. They make the photo the entire background of the home page with the tag line “This is how you Sonic.” Sonic’s site has very little noise to not conflict the photo, leaving all navigation relatively small and fixed to the top and bottom of the page. The site does feel pretty balanced with a slight weight to the right side of the page. The only improvement that I would make is to the clickable tabs. There is no real indication that certain things are clickable or separate tabs without prior knowledge of a typical website layout.

White Castle’s site is separated into thirds. The emphasis is focused in the bottom third of the home page, promoting new products. I feel this was a good design, to see the new products square at eye level one must scroll and expose more of the site. White Castle also allows customers to upload photos to the site, consuming the middle third. There is more noise to the White Castle side, but necessary and organized. There are several obvious clickables with headlines like Learn More and Submit.

Overall I feel that Sonic has a more interesting site with high customer engagement. Also when opening the site your faced with a promotional pop-up for summer smoothies at Sonic. This promotion has what I thought was an endless scroll of anything from interesting facts about summer, to flavor combinations, and other entertaining phrases.