The owner of a popular steakhouse was looking to update the look and feel of their existing website. Drawing inspiration from the look and feel of their restaurants and menu items, I designed and developed a website that reflected the fine dining experience their patrons could expect to enjoy.
Visuals
Visuals should reflect the high-end look of the brand and locations.
Content Heavy
Included a large amount of content, including high-quality imagery that would increase page scrolling and load time.
Maintenance
The site would need regular updates to content performed by users of average technical experience.
Tasks
As the Senior Web Designer / Developer, I was tasked with designing a web-based UI that reflects the fine dining experience of the restaurant while finding a way to include all of the required images and content and minimize the load time and overall size of each page.
Actions
Research
Gather all images and content from the client
Collaboration
Regular meetings with Project Managers (2), Brand Designers (1), Developers (1), and Stakeholders (4) to be sure all requirements were being met.
Wireframes & Concepts
Designed wireframes to layout content and find UI components that could handle large content and images. This helped to reduce the time designing high-fidelity layouts.
Image Optimization
Used image optimizers to reduce the size of images to 2MB or less, and site caching plugins to reduce load times
Relevant Content
Control over content visibility is provided to users through interface components, such as tabs and image enlargement.
Results
Rich Visuals
Strong, rich visuals throughout the site reflected the beautiful environment of the restaurants, along with the succulent menu items.
User Control
Using interface components such as tabs, users were given control over the content they could view throughout the site, and this reduced the overall page count of the site. UI helped to reduce the overall page size by 20%.
Easily Maintained
Using the WordPress content management system, content throughout the site could be updated quickly and easily by the average user.
Minimized Size
Minimal load times while maintaining high-quality images.
20%
Size Reduction
Overall size of site reduced by user interface.
32%
Customer Increase
User traffic and customer increased drawn by new visual design of site.
33%
Content Update Speed
With a CMS, the site could be quickly updated regularly in minutes.