Following my successful redesign and development of
The Fighting Cocks restaurant and pub website, the client returned to me to commission a similar project for another of his hospitality businesses. On the western coast of the island of Barbados stands a contemporary restaurant named
Nishi, famed for its fusion of Asian, English and Caribbean cuisine, signature cocktails and ample Sushi dishes.
Website audit
I approached this project in a similar format to that of the Fighting Cocks brief, beginning with an audit of the current online property that would outlay the improvements I'd intend to make. Overall my audit found that the aesthetics of the site were in good standing, but the content distribution and general layout needed much further consideration. Food menus were often duplicated and buried beneath multiple clicks before being accessible, greater emphasis was placed on secondary content pages over some of the core ones, and the usability was weak in some areas.
Crucially, the business was relying on email communication as its sole means of taking online bookings, so a major objective of this project was to setup and integrate a dedicated table reservation platform.
At the time of initiation, the food menu structure of the website was very chaotic. Internal linking would sometimes cause users to bypass the central menu page and send them directly to PDF downloads of the complete menu - irrespective of the section they were previously engaged with - which is not only poor practice but also disorientating. I made it a key point of criteria to address the presentation of the restaurant's menu with a much more considered design and simple functionality. I achieved this by splitting the full menu into individual sections to house it more succinctly in a user-controlled sliding display that is immensely easier to navigate and interpret.
I also created a new reservations page for the site that integrates with the Open Table booking system which the restaurant had adopted as part of this project. The booking widget also features on the new homepage to maximise conversion opportunities. The homepage carries a number of new design elements that help boost the overall appeal to first-time visitors as well as offer a cleaner layout and evolution of the brand aesthetic. Finely outlined illustrated icons introduce a new visual dynamic which I carried through the rest of my page designs and a few subtle touches of animation compliment the live experience. Additionally I coded brand new customer testimonial and interactive gallery pages into the site.
For businesses in the hospitality sector online reviews and accreditation from the likes of Trip Advisor is very important, however Nishi was doing a poor job presenting this on its site. At the base of every page was an awkward vertical assembly of badges and marque text piped in from an antiquated plugin that looked ugly and wasted a lot of space. I built a much more elegant pull-down display into the site footer which looks a lot more professional and conveys a great deal more information than the former arrangement.
T-shirt challenge