Our new client, the South City Group needed a website for Fire & Oak, which is a restaurant with 2 locations, one in Jersey City and one in Montvale NJ. They needed an improvement on their previous website, which while nice, was a flash prebuilt template. The previous designer did a great job filling in this template but like most flash only sites it was mostly style and not substance. Also the website which has ton of inbound links had a very poor search engine presence. This was most likely due to the fact that the site was 100 percent flash.

The client wanted a site that would be good looking but also have lots of information about the restaurants. They needed something more search engine friendly. They also needed something that could be updated quickly by a professional.

We sat down with the client and asked him to pick out a couple of competitor websites. We looked at these sites to get an idea of what pages we wanted on his website. The client also sent over a ton of photos that they had taken of the restaurant interior. They also had a lot of photos of their signature dishes. While interior photos always look good, the food photography they had was amazing really gives the restaurant website a professional look and feel.

The website content was to be HTML so that it would be easy to maintain and update. This would also guarantee superior search engine performance compared to the previous flash version. We made sure to design the website so that making changes to things such as the menu or other content would be very easy. The website also features at least 2 columns on each page so that there is plenty of room to tease upcoming events. We kept the navigation simple. Standard top navigation that is easy to use and straightforward. For pages containing menus and galleries we are utilizing a nifty category specific navigation to the left of the content. The result of all this is that the site is very easy to navigate, update and crawl.

From an application or programming standpoint the site is pretty simple. The flash banner at the top is custom made. We are pretty happy with it. The banner has a sliding menu with links to opentable.com and the photo gallery… The banner also takes input from the page calling it; telling the banner what xml file to use as instructions for choosing photos to display. This makes it easy for us to just edit the html calling the flash to change photos. It also features a custom preload algorithm to only load the "next" photo. We also built a custom simple ajax photo gallery for the site. We wanted something simple and light. A lot of the galleries available on the net have too many options. We built a simple image gallery with jquery and it is lightning fast. Its also xml driven, so again creating new ones or changing old galleries is a breeze.

In the future we would like to integrate some social media stuff somewhere on the site… Probably something like a twitter crawl. We might also build a Facebook wall application for the site. What I really want to do is place open table reservations from the site, but I cant seem to find an open table SDK….

You can see the finished product at www.fireandoak.com

Before our Revamp

As you can see the below screenshot of the old site showed a nice looking template with little to no useable information. On top of the basic design it was all flash so it did not do well in the search engines and was hard to update.

After our Revamp

Our design still has a very nice flash element at the top of it but it has real pages of useful information.   It has html text which search engines love (great from an seo standpoint).  This template is very easy to update and its unique to the client :)