I have been working with Nick Bruno, owner of Whispers Restaurant in Spring Lake New Jersey, for a few years now and he is an outstanding client. At our project kick off meeting, which lasted a few hours, we talked about the restaurant business, he showed me around the establishment, and we even discussed the high tech no flush urinals he was considering purchasing. I got a peek at his limited edition Ford Mustang Bullit, styled in honor of Steve McQueen's, and I was in awe. He offered to let me drive her, but I declined. It is just way too much pressure to have control of a man's prize Mustang.
In discussing our plans for the new whispersrestaurant.com, Nick explained to me that he decided the beautiful Victorian Whispers needed a taste of the modern, and so he had the back dining room renovated, the first step of realizing his new vision. The room is decorated in black, with gold accents, modern furniture, and all done very elegantly. Since our original meeting many years ago, the whole restaurant has been transformed.
My updates to whispersrestaurant.com are a reflection of this rebirth. When I originally designed the site, I borrowed from the restaurant's textures as I do with many of my restaurant sites. The black wallpaper is represented in the header, the gold accents mimic those at the Spring Lake restaurant, but I decided to keep the Victorian ornaments as Whispers, although now modern, is still a Victorian girl at her heart.
The site is completely coded in accordance with the W3C School's Web 2.0 guidelines. I originally had JavaScript fading content coded into one restaurant menu page, but this has been replaced by many restaurant menu pages each with their own titles and keyword laden URLs. This allows for two things. First, having individual pages with unique titles, unique data, and unique content is a huge plus when optimizing the site for search engine visibility. Second, and more importantly in my opinion, having the menus on their own pages allows Nick to link directly to any of the individual menus when posting on the Whispers Restaurant Facebook fan page. Giving visitors what they need, and only what they need when they need it makes happy visitors, which soon turn into happy diners.
The final enhancement I made to the site was to overhaul the slideshow teaser/image gallery on the home page. The old teaser/gallery was built in Adobe Flash and we all know Adobe Flash has fallen on hard times ever since Steve Jobs decided to banish it from Apple's mobile devices. Whispers new teaser/gallery is a JavaScript driven slideshow, sized to nicely allow the homepage to fit on the iPad's landscape screen. It also allows the flexibly of adding special messages and alerts without major surgery, a plus for advertising the restaurant's specials.
DANSPED.COM