I plan to redesign the Website for The Girl & The Goat . This Chicago Restaurant is of high quality and very well rated, but its website does not match the level of taste of its food and interior. In my redesign I will clarify the navigation of the site and play up the People, farm connection, and menu of the Girl & The Goat that seem to be the most important aspects of the restaurant's identity.
Girl & the Goat has been serving fun foods, craft beers, and making wine in a rustic and bad ass environment since summer 2010. The restaurant opens at 4:30 every day, and stays open until 11pm on weeknights and until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays (until those last late night eaters scrape their fork across the plate for the last time, or finish licking their plates until they're shiny and clean). The Goat's menu is divided into three categories: Vegetable, Fish, and of course Meat--while vegetable, fish, or meat are respectively the main stars of their categories, there are crossovers in each area so you'll get a little bit of everything. Bread is baked daily, and there are always new creations on the menu.
Girl & the Goat sits in the West Loop smack dab in the Randolph Restaurant Corridor, but the location is still gritty enough to appeal to the chef’s integrity. The Goat has a variety of seating choices, including a comfortable lounge, bar seats, standard table seating, and four seats close enough to the kitchen line that you might be asked to help.
Girl & the Goat blended their own wine, and it's tasty. There are beers on tap from Three Floyd’s and a couple others. If you're lucky, you might come across the elusive collaboration beers that Stephanie personally crafted with a couple of beer buddy cohorts. In addition to tap beers, there's also a bunch of bottles to choose from. Girl & the Goat is open 7 days a week, because The Goat is a tireless beast, and besides, who needs rest anyway? Girl & the Goat accepts reservations but always welcomes walk-ins, nomads, adventurers, and those of you who don’t like to plan.
–awkwardly organized, making it harder to flow through
–cluttered with links, scale of the various links also confuses the hierarchy of information on the site
–so many elements seen at once that its hard to know where to go and what to look at
–navigation bar gets more lost among the collaged photos and various links
–incorporation of many images throughout the site experience, but in a way that just adds to the clutter and doesn’t even really allow you to enjoy any one image as the largest they get is still quite small
–mix of elegance and whimsy or humor that the restaurant stands for not quite coming together
–many good aspects that the site is trying to acheive (social media/sharing photos, shop), but they don't all live within the page or site
–idea of farm –> table, importance of food sources to the restaurant
–importance of photographs and storytelling
–incorportion of goat (illustration)
–interest in community involvement
–blending lighheartedness and a sense of humor with fine dining
–Responsive, elegant design that incorporates photographs in a very dynamic way throughout the site
–does a good job of highlighting the people and the food of the restaurant
–incorporation of social media flows within the clear design of the site
–large scale, immersive images in a slide show
–Profiles of people involved
–link to open table at end of site experience
–fun use of typographic expression in the header, both elegant and whimsical
–clear design and navigation
–incorporation of a slideshow of images at a larger scale
–a much better example of how housing most information on a single page can work (with links to downloadable menus)
–Clean, elegant, responsive design with character
–Photographs/slideshows take spotlight and also work well in the responsive design
–well organized, clear menu at each scale
–home page does a good job of giving a taste of multiple things you can find throughout the site without being too cluttered or overwhelming
–Clean, elegant, responsive design, prominently featuring more playful type tratments and photos
–parallax design, but feels more like a more traditional site overall, due to the way the navigation bar works and the way each section usually takes up the full page
–clear menu at each scale