Design for Web. OUGD504.

Designing for web has many different components, the most important being navigation around the site. There are many different ways to navigate around a website, and these are some of the common and uncommon conventions of navigation. For my website I need the navigation to be simple and easy to use as my target audience is quite broad. 

Looking into the content of my website, it is clear that the restaurants I choose need to be lesser known and mainly independent and not a chain. This is because the aim of my website is to give the user a new experience of eating out, which needs to be new and exciting, different from anything they have seen before. This website is for someone who is looking for something special, for an occasion or to wind down at the end of a bust week and so the restaurants need to reflect this. I have researched restaurants around leeds and there are a lot of exciting independent restaurants for me to choose from, but for the sake of keeping my website simple without too many pages I have chosen three of my favourites to focus on. 

• Friends of Ham
• Little Tokyo
• Cielo Blanco

These three give a wide range of prices, flavours and atmospheres and so of the purpose of my website, will work really well together.

The website needs to include a lot of information without being cluttered or confusing, and so the content is really important. The most important aspect is the information about the restaurants. This pages(s) need to include the name of the restaurant, its address, the type of food they sell, the genial atmosphere and the price range. However I think that the address and location could be put onto a separate page with a map and so on. 

The home page of my website needs to be exciting and inviting, making the reader want to carry on through the site and find what they are looking for. A holding page with just a logo or image could work, although it isn't necessarily needed. I think that a simple design with a logo and a short piece of information would work well and would be clear to the user. 

The website would have to flow easily and all f the pages need to be able to link between each other so that the user can easily navigate around and find what they are looking for. I think hat it is important that the navigation bar stay the same throughout the website so that it is consistent and the user knows where to look for information. I also think that it is important that the home page is linked up to everything on the website so that it is easy to navigate. 

The layout or my website needs to be fairly simple and easy to navigate, as my audience is quite broad and so it needs to be easy to use and understand. I have chosen to use a very simple grid system as I think this it the best way to set out a simplistic design that is easy to understand. The logo and the navigation bar will remain in the same place throughout the whole website so that the user understands easily where to go to look for things and also to keep the running theme throughout. 

The colour scheme for this I want to keep fairly neutral, but perhaps with a bit of colour to keep it interesting and so that it appeals to my audience. However, I think I will keep it to a two or three colour minimum so it is easily understandable and doesn't get over crowded like some of the other restaurant websites I have been looking at.

I want to website to look ilk this in the way that it is very simplistic and stylish, and looks very professional. I really like the use of overlapping text and image, although I don't know how well this would work for my concept. 

 Home page

Restaurant Page

Feedback

From the feedback I got int he session from these initial layouts, I was told that the layout was too cramped and that I need to spread the information over the page rather than have it all squashed into the centre. I think that this is a good idea as it would make the pages more easy to navigate for all users. I also got feedback on the colour of my font, and my peers thought that using the yellow as the font colour was slightly too difficult to read, especially on a bright computer screen. It was suggested that I swap the colours around and use grey as the font colour and yellow as the highlight colour to underline and show when a button is being clicked. 
Taking this feedback into account, I have made some changed to my final layout designs for each of my pages.

And so from here I went on to draw up my final website layouts and wire frames for each of the pages.

The wire frames show me exactly where to place each of my components on each page, and also give me the exact measurements I will need for coding my website. This will make it much easier for me to code my website, rather than guessing where and what size each of my components needs to be.