Restaurant Website Research

Responsive Design, Restaurant Sites, and Nepali Cuisine

Users

Users of all types will be using this website in a variety of possible contexts including mobile, tablet, and desktop. The site needs to be accessible, easy-to-navigate, and visually appealing to anyone at anytime and anywhere.

Functions

Home

- Name: Subname (Thali: Nepali Kitchen)
- Headline
- Logo/Branding
- Location – at least city wise
- Twitter Bar at the top (ex. Bailey’s Range – good for reviews, PR, and customer relations. This may only work on tablet and computer versions – may be too small to view on phone as banners are not fluid)
- Brief Description (Please call ahead for large groups. Non-smoking. All major credit cards accepted.)

Menu

- Breakfast, Brunch, Lunch, Dinner, Dessert, Specials, Drinks
- Serving Style – Individual Orders vs. Family Style
- Example: Republic's menu is sectional. You click on the section and presents you with the items in that section, rather than presenting a full menu. (http://www.thinknoodles.com/menu.html)
- Downloadable menus (Bailey’s Range)
- Use Cumin’s Menu for content (http://www.cumin-chicago.com/menu/).

About

Thali (meaning plate) is an Nepali meal made up of a selection of various dishes. Thali dishes vary from region to region in South Asia and are usually served in small bowls, called Katori, placed on a round tray, the actual thali. Sometimes a steel tray made with multiple compartments is used. In North America, people sometimes use plastic thalis because they are disposable. Typical dishes include rice, dal, vegetables, roti, papad, curd (yoghurt), small amounts of chutney or pickle, and a sweet dish to top it off. Restaurants typically offer a choice of vegetarian or meat-based thalis. The cultural and geographic diversities of Nepal provide ample space for a variety of cuisines based on ethnicity and on soil and climate. Some foods have hybrid Chinese, Tibetan, and Indian influences. Thali starts out with puris, chapatis (rotis), and different vegetarian specialities (curries). Nepalese food is milder and does not use any dairy products in the preparation; perfect for people conscious about their health related eating habits!

Contact Info

- Address: Map It! (http://baileysrange.com/)
- Locations: link to googlemaps
- Phone: Store, Owner
- Email: Store, Owner

Social Media Info

- Facebook
- Twitter
- Pinterest
- Newsletter/Email Updates: Sign-Up

Hours of Operation

Reservations

Services

- Delivery: Online Orders
- Carry-Out: Online Orders
- Catering
- Special Events
- Gift Cards

Employment Opportunities

Promotions

Presentation

I wish to create a website for an Nepali restaurant with a mid-level price range. It needs to have clear identity and strong rand equity that can exist online. The challenges that similar restaurants face are a lack of understanding the menu. The types of dishes served are not necessarily familiar to the public. Therefore, including food descriptions, explanation of meal types, and how food is prepared will be essential. There is also sometimes a cultural barrier between the presentation of the restaurant to their audience, whether it is a knowledge of social media or an understanding of coherent design. For example, there are several succesful restaurants across the counrty of this type that have poorly designed sites. Redesigning their sites could help there business even more. Such restaurants include Tamarind in New York, Gokul in St. Louis, and Cumin and Nepal House in Chicago. This restaurant will need a design that shows off the appeal and atmosphere of restaurant based on food, look & feel, and interiors, and one that will also bridge the cultural barriers to develop a stronger online presence and brand. The site should also be easily connected to different social media.

Responsive Design

Elements in responsive design include Media Queries. For this you must know and decide where are the breaking points and limits of the width of the browser?

Also having a fluid grid system that has page elements designed in relative units (percentages & ems) rather than absolute units. Must know at what point does the grid system change – grid, column width, headers, font sizes. Also you must think about moving from horizontal orientation to a vertical orientation. Parallax scroling and continuous scrolling designs seems to work well for responsive design. Pastaria does this well (http://pastariastl.com/).

Another issue is using flexible images that can display at percentages and resize to fit browsers. For this you should pay attention to cropping and resizing in extreme detail. Let’s Travel Somewhere has a nice approach for responsive design with large images (http://www.letstravelsomewhere.com/). The images resize very easily as the browser width changes. It works well for other reasons including how the page links turn into a menu at a certain breakpoint and how the grid moves from 2 columns to 1 at breakpoints.

Concepts

The Mobile first concept is to begin your desiging and builing process with a basic mobile phone site then upgrade to smartphones and more complex designs. Device-awareness thinking will aide in the site being able to decide which site to use by the given context and style guides. You should also beware of image heavy site work.

There is a theory that mobile users only want context-specific information. Not every function is needed at any given time on a site and mobile users tend to have a specific function or action in mind, but users can use mobile devices for anything at anytime anywhere. You have to be able to serve all needs. However, making assumptions about your user is dangerous. If a function is too hard to find or perform on a mobile device, or any device for that matter, they may turn to another service or stop using your site altogether. Creating a clear hierarchy based upon market and user research of the most desired functions may be the best opportunity to solve this issue for responsive design without creating a specific mobile application.

One approach for designing for the web is thinking about it in four design scenarios: mobile in portrait screen view, mobile in landscape scree view, tablet in portrait screen view, and tablet in landscape screen view, will cover laptops and desktops as well. For this designers must now consider how the site will look at different widths in order to achieve truly great responsive design.