A Website Critique

Hey all,

I wanted some feedback on the template i’ve been working on. You seem to know what your talking about, hopefully y’all can help :wink:

Here’s a little background…

This template is designed for a modern, sophisticated restaurant, one that wants an online presence that reflects the restaurant well. It’s designed with a clean and elegant look using a color scheme of red, gray, and white.

The back-end is also designed for a non-coder because it uses simple to edit XML files as menus which then dynamically update the menu page and the featured item on the homepage. PHP and jQuery to create the menu and image gallery type thing on the home page.

Please be completely honest about anything, design, code, whatever. I know that it may not validate, that, and the contact page doesn’t send an email because my free host im using temporarily doesn’t allow contact forms to send an email. So those are two known issues, and im just so sick of staring at this thing that I could use some fresh perspective.

http://chivalrie2.vndv.com/index.php

Thanks in advance, Zach

You need more contrast and get the navigation aligned. Also, I would choose another font. Price tags could be more creative.

Hope this helps

Red is too light for my LCD and grey text on it doesn’t look so well. Also you could add some padding to navigation for more pressful, but code looks fine. And I really love those potatoes!

thanks for the suggestions.

i just updated the contact page to make it more consistent with the menu page using the same style of box/header.

@segen – what do you mean by more contrast…eg. some different colors, some different pictures? i was going for a simplistic design so I tried not to be too adventurous in combining colors but stick with one bold family.

@Valuediz – “you could add some padding to navigation for more pressful, but code looks fine. And I really love those potatoes! :D” – not sure what you mean by more pressful navigation…or what potatoes your talking about, but thanks

I felt typography was my weakest point as well, but not sure of any specific ways to improve upon it. suggestions?

oh…btw, I purposely kept both the main navigation and the submen area unaligned to sort of break with the straight lines and linear nature of the design for some interest and direct the eye there, but maybe that didn’t work…who knows.

color codes:

CA2317

4A221F

4A0D08

333333

I think it needs some work.

I’m using a smaller screen at the moment and have quite a bit of horizontal scrolling.

ok, i made a quick change to make the width 960px, so that should fix the horizontal scrolling issue. more changes soon to come.

-zach

hey all,

made changes. start the critiques. Chivalrie

thanks, -Zach

take a look at http://abduzeedo.com/web-design-restaurant-sites maybe You get some inspiration there

@segen – thanks for the link. i remeber that post but forgot about it. ill take a look for some future design ideas. im actually working on a series of restaurant themes, this only being the first.