One of the bigger sites I made last year was winefoodbeer.com, which is a group website for 4 pubs in Ireland. There were 5 pubs originally but one closed down since. The remaining ones are The Oslo, The Salthouse and The Cottage in Galway, and Against The Grain in Dublin. When I had finished the site it had over 50 pages, so it was relatively complex for one of my first freelance projects. Since it went live the pages and content have all been managed by each of the pubs.
A small web design agency in Galway came to me to ask me if I would design and create the site, so there was a lot of bouncing of ideas around before anything was settled on. I wanted to go with something fresher than the existing site they had up, but they wanted to keep a lot of the existing design elements. The design I wanted to go with was something like this:
WineFoodBeer homepage, my original concept
The gap in the centre was needed at the time in case a 5th pub was added. They weren’t too sure what the craic was with it at the time so we kept it open. This design didn’t push the right buttons for them though so in the end the site ended up looking like this:
WineFoodBeer homepage, the current live version
The background here was carried across from their old site because they liked it. It is a pretty nice pattern, so I can see why they kept it. Another thing they wanted to keep was the logo:
Header with current logo
I didn’t agree with this myself, because it’s one of the first things your eyes land on when you load a web page, as well as your anchor to return to the homepage on the vast majority of websites. It holds a lot of weight, so I wanted to spruce it up a bit so it would fit into the design and be less of an eyesore:
Header with quick and basic logo I put together
The basic white logo was what existed on their previous site though so they wanted to keep that too. It was unfortunate, but these things happen!
One of my problems when I’m designing things is that I spend way too much time playing with shadows and details to try to make things look like you could touch them. That’s one of the parts of design I really enjoy most. Subtle touches can make a huge difference to how things are perceived.
Shadows and textures
More shadows and textures
Menu links for each bar/restaurant
The design was agreed on in the end anyways, and I went ahead and began coding up the website. Each pub-restaurant was to have a landing page and it’s own sub-pages with photo galleries, location maps, contact pages, event pages and menu pages.
Individual landing pages for each pub/restaurant
Group menus menu, which each link off to the specific menu page per restaurant
Events page which holds flyers for upcoming events, linking to more details
In the finished website I added a sliding panel above the footer which will rotate through the events and offer flyers. This features on all pages and it’s a good idea, because when your website users get to the bottom of any page you want them to stay interested and click on something, rather than bouncing off to another website!
Check out the site at winefoodbeer.com if you like, and thanks for reading!