Explore each of your choices, then describe and compare the two sites use of Balance, Unity, Emphasis, and Layout. How do they use these principles and implement Krug’s five important “things” to make sure users see and understand the site? Is one site more effective than the other at drawing your attention, and why?

I chose the Six Penn Kitchen and No. 9 as the two restaurants to talk about and compare.  The two restaurants have very similar color palettes that they use for their websites.  They both have a very slate grey background with a white type color.

The layout for the Six Penn Kitchen is simple, yet elegant in design.  The navigation bar is on the top of the page with three links on each side of the banner/navigation bar.  The website has a very good balance to it, because they divided the navigation bar into two, 3 links on one side and three on the other.  The content on each page is centered and heated presented to the viewer of the website.  Overall the website portrays that it is a 4-5 star restaurant.  The information that is important is made to be larger, usually in an green color type and/or white color type, then the less important information is smaller and in light colored text, grey or off white.  Each page follows a similar theme and set up.

The layout for No. 9 is similar in the sense of color palette to that of the color palette for Six Penn Kitchen. It has a grey/slate colored background with an off-white text and what even looks like a very light shade of blue for the navigation bar.  The navigation bar for this website is on the left hand side, unlike the previous site that was on the top.  The balance of the website is really nice, you have the navigation on the left, picture on the top and some links, and the main text on the bottom.  It really makes the website look elegant and the information is easy to read. The emphasis is not really that great with this website as it was with the previous website, because when you clicked on the menu link, it took you to a part of the site that had 4 links that were being distracted by a picture.

Both websites used a very clear visual hierarchy, although No. 9’s website lost that when venturing into other pages.  Restaurant No. 9 had a very good advantage of both naming and graphics, whereas the Six Penn Kitchen did not. I expected the color palette to reflect that of the name and geographic location but it lacked that.  The pages for both restaurants websites were both broken into easily defined areas.  You could tell what was what and where you were getting your information from.  Restaurant No. 9 was a little difficult to tell what were clickable links once you broke off from the main home page. I thought at first the text was words describing the restaurant or something but it actually was a link, but because some were not capitalized and they were italicized it made it difficult to tell at first.  The Six Penn Kitchen had clearly defined links to pages, which made it very easy to navigate through.  I feel that both websites did well with minimizing noise.