Design Exploration: Black Angus

For design exploration I chose what initially appears to be a rather simple site, Black Angus Restaurants. The Flash intro movie is what immediately caught my eye, but then as I looked further I realized that the site was well-designed overall and met the criteria that we've been discussing in class. Though it may be hard to read from my captions, it has a logo, content area, and navigation that also serves as a page identifier when you change pages. The navigation text subtly changes color on the page you're viewing to act as a page identifier.



What I also like is the cleanliness of the site. It's pretty easy to figure out which page to go to for a given reason. The color scheme is consistent with the image the restaurant is trying to present. The other minor thing that annoys me is that some of the pages are slightly different sizes so it jumps a little occasionally. However, that's probably nitpicking when considered to the overall site's look.

Another thing that crossed my geeky mind is that in addition to the Flash intro movie the site makes extensive use of Javascript to load the images (client-side) on the pages. Some of the pages also use .php and/or .asp for server and perhaps database communications. This allows the web site to be a lot more powerful than just the traditional web site.

Due to Black Angus adherence to good web design principles I'd give it a 4.9 out of 5. However, the fact that I haven't eaten breakfast yet probably biases my opinion. :)