Baratta's Steakhouse
The Baratta's Steakhouse is a restaurant located in Carroll, Iowa. This business is intertwined with a very popular local hotel in the area, known as the Carrollton Inn. This is the current website that is used by both businesses as a singular site. As you can see on the website, the Carrollton Inn owns the domain to the website and Baratta's Steakhouse is only hosted on a single webpage. Not to mention the food menu for Baratta's is very lackluster as it is just a PDF file within the webpage with no way to order online. This becomes a pain point for a business that may want to expand.
The aim of this project is to completely separate Baratta's from the Carrollton to its own respective domain to drive an increase in more traffic. While optimizing SEO to increase new traffic, online ordering is now being introduced as a new lane for ordering this delicious food with a waitlisting option available.
The Concept
While viewing the Baratta's page on the Carrollton website, it was very clear that they needed their own website as this was not accomplishing anything. Having these two businesses connected together on the same website limited the features that Baratta's could potentially carry. Baratta's Steakhouse is a separate business entity from the Carrollton Inn, so it should be treated as such.
While planning the website's design for Baratta's, it was important to include a similar design style to the hotel's website since they are in the same building setting. Online ordering was next at the top of my list with a Join Waitlist option, these two features are very common in the industry today. With these concepts in mind, I was ready to begin wireframing the project.
The Process
I started off with some light research into Baratta's. The research didn't take me too long as I had already ideated that the website would need to look similar in design style to the hotel and to include online ordering. The menu also needed a new look opposed a PDF file for order placing through the phone. The problem with the current iteration was the fact that the Baratta's single webpage was hosted through the Carrollton Inn. Baratta's deserves their own website with their own features unique to a restaurant and not a hotel.
Then, I began to design the wireframes and shape the elements to a style unique to Baratta's while keeping the design style of the hotel in mind. I kept things as simple as possible when choosing call-to-action buttons or other elements within the prototype. Most restaurants have too much information on their home page which makes it difficult to navigate. I had simplicity at the top of my priorities when delivering this prototype of the website.
When I had all of my wireframing and layouts completed, I was ready to begin designing the site with photos, videos, colors, and any other elements I had forgotten. Each page is designed with simplicity for the customers in mind. The menu page would feature a different entrée each time the menu is entered adds a dynamic experience to ordering from the website. User testing followed after the designs with steps laid out in front of them. Overall, users seemed very pleased with the layout and the interactive parts of the prototype.
