The two restaurants’ sites that I chose to explore were Franktuary and Six Penn Kitchen. I have never been to either of these restaurants and haven’t really heard anything about them before now, so I had to rely entirely on their websites to discover exactly what they were.

The first site I picked to look at was Franktuary’s. My first impression of the site was not a good one at all. The home page lacks any information at all, only displaying a big picture of empty glasses, the name of the site, a generic navigation menu at the top and their most recent tweet. Based on this, I had no idea what this “restaurant” was. In fact, it looked more like a site for a bar because of the background image. Since I was still clueless, I clicked on the “about” link hoping to be enlightened. Again, the background picture made me think it was a bar since it was of bottles of alcohol. The written about section, although it was what I initially wanted to read, after looking at it I lost interest. They seemed to have made the paragraph text bold and the headings regular text which makes it harder to read and puts emphasis in the wrong place. The fact that it is white text on a dark background only added to the difficulty in reading it. After looking through the “press,” “blog,” and “photos” pages I was slightly happier with the site as a whole. Each of those pages had a good sense of unity and balance with the content all being in the same container and being where I expected it to be. It lost some of that unity when I looked through the three location options since each one had a different way the menu was displayed, making me have to question if I clicked on the right link or something was wrong. There really isn’t much to this site or its layout, and I kind of wish there was more, especially on the home page. Even though I cannot say I am a fan of it, it does do a decent job at following Steve Krug’s list of things to be obvious from the end of the Street Signs and Breadcrumbs chapter of Don’t Make Me Think. Each page has the site ID clear at the top of the page in the same spot. Aside from the homepage, they all have the page name displayed at the top of the content box. The primary navigation is always located at the top, although the buttons do not change to display your current location. Like Krug mentions in the aforementioned chapter, the site designer made the “you are here” indicators too subtle in the fact that the only indication is the page name at the top. The local navigation shows up when on the different location pages and has the same issues at the primary navigation. As for the search option, I did not even realize it was there until I really looked for it. It is at the bottom of each page, except the home page, which was a bad choice. It is also very repetitive in that the heading reads, “Search the Site,” the search box reads “search for:,” and the button to search says “search.” They easily could have taken out two of the “searches” by taking out the “search for:” and changing the button to simply have a magnifying glass like Krug mentions is universally recognizable as a search mechanism. Overall, I was very disappointed with Franktuary’s website.

Next I searched the Six Penn Kitchen website. Compared to Franktuary’s, I was very happy with the homepage. They included a good amount of information in a way that didn’t overwhelm the page. They showed the restaurant itself along with a few photos of their food and also did a little bit of bragging. They have a nice, clean navigation bar at the top that stays standard throughout the whole site and some secondary navigation at the bottom with their location and options to contact them. Unlike with Franktuary’s site, the layout of each different page of Six Penn’s is slightly different but still stays unified by keeping the same navigation at the top and bottom as well as using the same colors and fonts. Although they also utilize a mostly white font on a dark background, it is easier to read because of their thinner, sans serif font choice and spacing. Although Franktuary’s site did a decent job with Krug’s list, Six Penn did better. Their site ID was similarly always located at the top of the page, though the page names did not reappear above the content. I did not feel that it was too much of an issue though because unlike the other site, Six Penn’s navigation bar had page names that changed to a bold green when you were on that page. That made their “you are here” indicators more obvious. When on pages like the menu, the local navigation did the same thing, which unified the design further. There was no search option that I could find on this site, but the links were so self-explanatory and the site itself was simple enough that a search option did not seem necessary.

Comparing the two sites, they both had a similar layout and balance with the top navigation being strong and the rest of the content being centered below. But based on the way each handled their design, Six Penn comes off as a much classier and respected restaurant that I would rather go to. They made it easy to navigate their site and find exactly what you are looking for, unlike Franktuary’s which leaves me with more questions than answers.