Input On A VERY Rough Draft Of Our Website

My sister operates some fairly large websites (one was on CNN and NPR a couple weeks ago) and is working on a website for me. The sites she runs are for actors and tv shows, so a restaurant is a pretty big shift. She has a good start, but some things seem off and I’m not quite sure what exactly it is. The navigation seems a little choppy to me and I think there’s a little to much black, but it will look better when we get the photos of our food uploaded.

http://pyramid-pizza.com

Looks like an excellent start - love the logo! I’d add more color and food pictures (obviously) to really get people interested. Also be sure to offer a “Sign Up for…” area to your website. Capture as many emails and contact infos as you can - this will help you market to people in numerous ways and increase revenue each week. All the best!

Seems OK so far. How about a map showing your location?

The buffet implies you have ‘dine in’, but I see no mention of ‘carry out’ or ‘delivery’ if you offer them.

I really like it so far. The first thing I look at is your logo and then your menu on the right - but it took me a second to figure out it was your menu. Maybe making the headers a little bigger or more pronounced would be good. I do think adding food photography will be great. Looking forward to seeing updates.

Isn’t the site really just a blog? Seems to be put together with Wordpress - and not really a “website” at all, in the normal and traditional sense.

I agree that it looks a bit like a blog, but only insofar as it has superfluous info like ‘Date posted’ and by who - and comments (do you really want to be constantly policing comments?). But I think it’s a great start with a very good look and feel. But I’ll be hypercritical for the sake of brainstorming…

I think the dark green background of the banner is a bigger problem than the black. I did a site once that was designed by a professional graphic designer that had a very similar dark green (all over). At first I loved it, but was really sick of it by the time I was done. Eventually, the whole company thought that the dark color was too heavy and overly dramatic - to the point of depressing - and we finally replaced it. As a first step, you might try a grayscale image of one of your pizzas (or something else - dough tossing, fired oven, etc.) and superimpose a transparent green rectangle over it and play with the color and transparency until you have a nice background for your banner. Then select a color from that graphic to re-use for a background color.

I would also make the banner less tall. On my laptop, it forces the featured content to run off the bottom of the screen. I wonder if you need to repeat the Pyramid Pizza name when the nice logo is perfectly clear as to that.

Hopefully, once you get your pictures up, you’ll be featuring your actual specials rather than links to them.

I would move your lunch buffet banner to the top-right and eliminate most of the other stuff on the right. Put the menu on its own ‘tab’ where you can provide a description for each item. As it is, the menu poses more questions than answers (e.g What’s a King Tut?).

Add a prominent Order Now link leading to a page that describes ordering options - even if it’s only a phone number. One of my first questions is whether I can order online. An ‘Order Now’ link will answer that (either in the affirmative or negative) quickly.

I like the brick background but you might experiment with blurring/fading the image to get the eye to focus on the content rather than individual bricks.

Large/Medium/Small - How big? Serves how many?

Google maps are seldom a bad thing.

Feel free to PM me if you’d like and I’d be happy to mock up some ideas gratis. I’m an under-contracted IT consultant who is entranced by the thought of opening my own pizzeria but am trying to resist the siren’s song. Better to use some of my free time to get closer to the biz rather than sitting around watching the Food Network.

Is not that a line thats gets blurred more and more each day.

I think it looks pretty good. Sorta with the colors an “old School” feel if thats what your after. Since you made it clear that it is more of a rough outline than a finished site, I assume you will make the changes that are needed to make it a real site. I am guessing you are just looking for feed back as to what it feels like…Some sites strike me as cold or uninviting some are warm ( I think your is) some more Hi tech or clean…I think your off to a good siart…

is that a “r” registered after the logo?

you shouldn’t be using that unless you actually have a federally registered mark. according to the USPTO, United States Patent and Trademark Office, you don’t!

what’s the deal?

I build all of my sites now on Wordpress. You be hard pressed to tell that most of my sites are ON Wordpress from looking at them though. Some theme modification on that site, and you’d never know. I agree about the line blurring though… a blog is a website. All websites aren’t blogs though. Depends on your content.

Certainly better than mine! well…I don’t have one up yet :smiley:

I agree with the comments about the “menu” area to the right. It seemed like it took my eye too much time to identify and “use” that area, doesn’t really scream “MENU” to me. I would also suggest more separation in the prices following the descriptions, it seemed that it was a bit bunched up there.

Great logo btw.

Thanks for the input everyone, some very good ideas for refining the site. It is built using wordpress, but wordpress is no longer just for blogs. The beauty of it is it’s versatility and how easy it is to update, even if you’re on a public computer. It will also give me the chance to write short articles about what we’re doing in our community and put a much more personal feel to the store, which is important to our success.