Icon - Perry's Steakhouse & Grille

Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille

Client Perry's Steakhouse & Grille Industry Restaurant Year 2015
01

Overview

Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille is a chain of steak restaurants located throughout the United States. For a number of years, my agency worked on their branding, advertising and web site. Their site, however, was due for a redesign to help reflect the classy, modern theme that the client had come to be quite proud of. My role for this project would be to redesign and redevelop the site from the ground up.

02

The Approach

Wireframe

Receiving the information architecture from my co-workers, I worked with my manager to carefully craft the layout of the content and functions in a wireframe. As visuals of the products was a priority for the client and necessary for users to be able to see the available menu items, we decided to allow for space for large photographs to be seen in most sections of a given page. This included the hero rotator, page images, and menu sections. While there needed to be text content, we wanted to be sure that the imagery encouraged visitors and that it would be detailed information that would be quick to the point and move them to make a reservation.

High-Fidelity Concepts

Using the wireframes, I worked on the high-fidelity concepts. Using the brand guidelines provided by the graphic designer, the site began to take shape. While the rich, chocolate brown remained a part of the branding from the previous site, for the large photographs to stand out, I chose to use white for the body background. The imagery of the products or the environment of the restaurant were used to create a visual separation between sections of content.

During analysis, it was found that users and the client were frustrated by the need to click further into the site to find information about a particular location. To alleviate this issue, I turned to creating a one-page layout that put all of the content on each individual location page. To reduce some of the scrolling, I used tab functions to hide some of the content until the user chose to look at it.

Making reservations was also of high importance to the client, so I decided to have it visible at all times in the footer which would remain at the bottom of the browser above all the content at all times.

Development

Once the concepts were approved, I began development using the WordPress content management system to allow for deep customization and ease of editing of content in the future. One of the bigger challenges was creating a system that any administrator, regardless of skill, could edit. Basically, I wanted to avoid any need to use code in things like the WYSIWYG editors. Solving called for a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields that allowed me to create editable regions in the layout that could be updated by just about anyone.

03

The Results

Following a couple of rounds of internal QA and client reviews, we launched the new site.

04

Epilogue

This site was a thrill for me to design and develop – a creative endeavor with challenges that tested my skills in development. Upon reflection:

Content Organization

A site does not necessarily need to be multiple pages. With some clever thinking, using tabs to show content when requested or rotators, content can all fit on a single page and still not feel crowded or over-encumbered.

User-centric

For many years, I had developed sites that I, as a developer could edit. While this kept development time down, it always proved difficult for users to edit once handed to them. While requiring some extra work, it proved beneficial both to the user and myself allowing me to think more deeply about how users look at interfaces and interact with them.