I’ve had the pleasure to work with both Michael and Kristen Benoit, the owners of the Vortex and the Bone Garden. My task was both to bring their websites up to date and bring forth the unique personalities of the two very different restaurants.
One of the first things to do when starting a site revamp is to set up analytics if they’re not in place yet. When I first started seeing the traffic coming to the site I was kind of blown away. It was in the tens of thousands and going to just a few pages. Maybe not surprising on either front. The Vortex has a cult following and most visitors are looking for the menu or how to get there.
keeping in mind that about half of the traffic was mobile and interested in just a select few locations, I reflected that in the structure of the home page. Dividing it between the two menus and two locations. Making those sections easily identifiable and clickable, increased usability across mobile devices.
A restaurant isn’t just a menu. It’s also the atmosphere. The Bone garden serves authentic Mexican food and is filled with paintings and folk sculptures celebrating the Day of the Dead. To quickly sum it up, it has a very happy, magical, skeleton vibe. Which I enjoyed very much.
I wanted to pull that same interesting, fun vibe into the website. The art work in the restaurant was so great, I featured it throughout the site. I took the photos of the paintings and integrated them into backgrounds of different sections and shots of sculptures were pulled to the foreground.
