Restaurant Website Critique

The French Laundry
This American restaurant is voted as one of the best restaurants in the world. The website is strangly quite relaxing, and does have a certain 'french' feel. It is a flash site, although it isn't flashy and has a simplistic and balanced layout.

Barnes Grill
Owned by Antony Warrel Thompson, the Barnes Grill website is flash based. Aesthetically this website is very appealing, however it acts as a microsite to his other restaurants so it has links to these. But these links are to big in comparison to the content window, that very little room is left for information and they dominate over the links concerning The Barnes Grill. To over come this problem the designer has created scroll bars. I'm not too keen on this idea as it can get quite frustrating having to keep scrolling all the time. Especially when there is so much 'white space' round the edges.

The Club
This Flash site gives the impression of a young, trendy and modern London restaurant/bar. The key to this site is its simplicity, with a few concise links allowing for easy navigation leading to all the information you might need. Its a great example of good design. The purpose of the site is clear, the links are where you would expect them, and subscription is positioned so that you are aware of it there but it is easy to ignore if you so wish. There is no need for the user to search the page for anything, and the information isn't clouded by flowery descriptions, everything has a purpose.

Marlybone 108
Although this website is aiming at a more mature audience, in a lot of ways is very similar to that of 'The Club'. It has key images and transparent boxes that contain the content. The colour scheme gives a impression of freshness and good quality and generally the site is well thought out. However, I'm not too keen on how the menu is displayed-a PDF in a new window. The only thing I would say is that the text is quite small and especially as they have an older target audience, this could prove problematic for people with bad eyesight. If I were to be really picky Iwould also make the darker bar with the sub categories perminant so it wasn't a roll-over effect.

Fifteen
This London based restaurant is owned by Jamie Oliver and as expected the website is well thought out and aesthetically pleasing. This site acts as a microsite, linked to all his other restaurants and products. All of which have their own identity all of which made by The Plant. The design itself is quite clever, addressing quite a large ranged audience although at times the quantity of text and links does seem overwhelming and would benefit from being reduced.


TarnThai
This website is the worst site I have come across and I can't think or anything positive to say. They have chosen a horrible poo brown for the background, chucked some almost irrelivant images where ever they happened to land and whats with the tacky waterfall animation?! not to mention the links with their orange background and basic blue link text. There is far too much text on the pages and with very little sub headings and ilogical layout the user is left feeling quite lost! This restaurant was a runner-up for the Best Oriental Restaurant by Nottingham Restaurant awards in 2007, so i'm sure its a good quality restaurant its just a shame they don't have a site to reflect that.

Fashion

This Nottingham based restaurant is addressing a 30-40's clientel. The design is quite appealing, however the information is very flowery with little to-the-point information. The text is qyuite small and ovewr powered by all the images surrounding it. The tab that is opened for the menu's has a similar look and colour scheme however layout wise is completly different/ In a lot of ways i prefer this design. The tabs allow for clear navigation and not over powered by images and the information is more concise and a readable size.
W1
This restaurante is owned by Gary Rhodes and it really reflects his stlye of food: fancy but not pretentious. I was really impressed by this website. It has elements of quirkiness that make it quite entertaining to navigate through. The design and animation is of a high standard and navigation is pain-free. I did notice however that on a couple of the Brasserie menus, the last dish is cut off but this is honestly the only fault I can see.