Hi everyone, it’s Erin and I’ve been let loose on the blog for the first time – eeek! I thought I’d use the opportunity to tell you about our latest launch; Oriel.
Located at Heathrow’s Terminal 3, Oriel is a restaurant offering travellers a taste of French Brasserie food along with all day breakfasts and an impressive wine and drinks menu.
This was a great little site for us to work on. The clean, elegance of the design echoes an era when travel was a real luxury. A soft, limited palette allowed us to have a bit of fun with the overall look; using typography as design elements; some quirky icons and a selection of vintage travel photographs.
We avoided the much used, distressed retro look to reflect that although the design is based on a bygone era, the restaurant has very much landed (sorry!) in this century.
So, why not take a little step back in time and click the link below, we’d love to know what you think!
www.orielrestaurants.co.uk
PKB is an eclectic mix of traditional pubs and contemporary bars (think chesterfield sofas, exposed brick walls and gold gilted frames) offering laid back dining by day and trendy cocktails by night.
The challenge here was housing 12 very diverse locations under one roof, maintaining a consistent style without losing the individual character and flair of each location (quite a task!).
The main landing page gives you a taste of what PKB offers, with a few quirky tricks thrown in (check out the vinyl as you scroll down the page). Once inside, each venue has it’s own homepage, showcasing it’s individual style; from a Tikki bar in central London, to a Shakespeare inspired tavern in Stratford upon Avon.
PKB is still a young brand, with many more venues in the pipeline – so we’re excited to see the site grow. So watch this space, check it out, and let us know what you think!
www.pizzakitchenbars.co.uk
The previous Giraffe website made quite a splash – with all the bright colours, huge typography and fancy Javascript – so when it came to re-design we had to pull out all the stops!
Giraffe has grown over the years, quite a bit in fact. When we had our first meeting with them many banner designs and emails ago there were only 4 or 5 locations, now there are over 40, I think it’s obvious: Somebody has a plan!
Part of this plan is to give certain locations new visual identities and menus. This meant we had to build one site with a strong overall brand while allowing each unique concept the ability to have their own content and design. A challenge!
Giraffe has always been a playful brand and we wanted to keep it that way so along with a big, bold colourful design we’ve added as much interaction into the site as we can, all while keeping it easy to use and – most importantly – useful, something a lot of restaurant website struggle to achieve.
To pull off the brands within a brand trick we’ve built the entire website on a template that with a simple change of stylesheet and content completely changes the look while keeping the feel. When browsing the site it’s always obvious where you are and always easy to head somewhere else. A neat trick!
Don’t just take our word for it, head to the site and have a play.
If you’re into fancy 3D CSS3 animations there are some clever touches to look out for when using Google Chrome or Safari:
- Turn the news pages on each brand homepage
- Perform a location search anywhere on the site (we’re particularly proud of this one!)
- Check out the “We’re loving this” panel
- Switch brand using the switch next to each logo!
It’s that time of year again when the office dons a tash for Movember in aid of charity. For those of you wandering down the street and noticing a large bunch of the male population starting to look ridiculous, don’t worry, you haven`t stumbled across the Tom Selleck fan club, it’s all just in aid of Movember.
We’ve got four of us in the office attempting to grow a ‘Mo’, although to be fair there’s only one true Mo Bro winner so far. Dave (Ned Flanders) is our appointed office ambassador with his rather impressive Magnum. Alex is not far behind, with a beautifully sculpted Horseshoe Mo, though going by rule #4, Alex is officially disqualified for having a goatee! (That is poppycock! They don’t join! – Alex)
Myself (Christian) and Will unfortunately have baby faces, maybe one day we’ll turn into real men!
Nothing more needs to be said really, other than that we’d be grateful if some of you fellow Mo Bro’s could sponsor us! Simply click the link below and choose to ‘Donate to my team’ (or instead, why not join our team like Dave’s mum appears to have done, much to to amusement of the whole office!)
Donate a little to the cause >
Keep checking our page and we’ll get some more mo’ photos uploaded with our mo-gress soon!
The time has come for us to expand our lovely little team to accommodate some of the great new work we’ve got lined up. Therefore, we’re looking for a fantastic web developer to join us. For the full job advert and details on how to apply just click here.
If the job perhaps doesn’t quite match your skill set but you know someone who’d be perfect for the role then please send them this way – or just re-tweet it if you’re feeling really nice using the button below.
Please note: This position has now been filled. Thanks to everyone who applied!
Own a Mac? Got growl installed, whether on purpose or by accident? Just updated to Lion and have decided that none of the default growl themes cut the mustard? Then look no further!
Anyone who already has our Growl theme and has installed Lion will notice that it is positioned a little odd now. I don’t really know why it was broken, but I’ve fixed it now, and I’m not really sure how I did that…
Anyway! The HTML is now a little neater and the CSS has been simplified too. I still can’t figure out how to get that close button above the body of the notification, it seems to be a common issue when using more advanced CSS so there’s nothing I can do about that I’m afraid.
Thanks to Ryan any bugs we had with this theme have been squished!
So, without further ado, click the link below and download yourself a snazzy new Growl theme! (Also, if you’re a Tweeter, click this link and share the love!)
Downloadengage.growlStyle.zip
Don’t worry, this isn`t going to be a long post begging you all to vote for us. I just thought it was worth a little mention that we’re honoured to have a couple of our recent projects short-listed in this years .net awards.
Firstly, Strada is is nominated for re-design of the year and then Giraffe is up for mobile site of year which is especially cool, as it’s running off our Pocket Diner application.
We’re amongst some great company and some awesome bits of work, so we’ll just have to wait and see how things pan out. But in the meantime, best of luck to everyone nominated – especially Harry Roberts (who you’ll more likely know as @csswizardry) who’s battling it out in the hotly contested ‘brilliant newcomer’ category. You’ve got our vote Harry!
The Bella Italia launch completes a trio of redesigns for the Tragus Group who also operate the popular Strada and Café Rouge brands, both of which have gone under the Engage knife in the last few months (and Strada has even been short-listed for .net’s ‘redesign the year award’ – which is très awesome!)
Of all the redesigns, I’d say that Bella gave us the most freedom to get a bit creative. The hand drawn style is one of my personal favourites as it let us inject a bit of personality and character into the designs – something which is too often lacking, especially in the corporate market.
The whole site is powered by our custom Content Management System, which gives the client control over everything they need, but not too much that it becomes unwieldy and intimidating. A tricky balance to achieve (as I’m sure many readers will appreciate) but one I feel like we’ve got right based on initial user feedback from the client.
Other bits worth a mention are the social integration, especially in the menu section where visitors can like and share all their favourite dishes on Facebook, and if you take a peek under the hood you’ll see there are some nice bits of HTML5 and JavaScript thrown in which deliver an extra bit of eye candy to visitors using supported browsers.
As usual, we hope you like the site and appreciate all comments and feedback below.
www.bellaitalia.co.uk
Hot on the heels of the new Strada launch, we’ve just pressed the big red ‘launch site’ button for the new Café Rouge website too. It’s got a little bit of the French ‘je ne sais quoi’ combined with some pretty fancy coding – an odd combination you may think, but it seems to work!
We’re rather proud of the HTML5 under the hood on this one, so if that’s your kind of thing, then feel free to view source. Otherwise we’ll leave you in peace to go and have a click around. If you’re using a Webkit browser, then you’ll be treated to a few extra little surprises for having such good taste (checkout the homepage ‘slider’ in Safari for example!)
We’ve also created a mobile version of the site, running on our Pocket Diner platform (naturally) which means you can browse all the essential information and even book a table whilst on the move – which is nice. Simply head over to www.caferouge.co.uk on your phone to check it out.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the site in the comments below as usual.
Au Revoir until next time! x
Over the last couple of months we’ve been hard at work with the Livebookings guys to roll out Pocket Diner, our restaurant mobile website service to Germany and Sweden so even more people can take their restaurant mobile.
After an initial ‘yeah that should be straight forward’ reaction, it quickly became apparent that translation throws up all kinds of little design issues you wouldn’t think of. Never the less, with a bit of tweaking and to-ing and fro-ing, we have today re-launched both the Pocket Diner main site, plus the mobile site and CMS in both new languages. Ja!
This comes at a time when Pocket Diner is really starting to take off, with our friends at Livebookings already installing it for over 200 of their customers in the UK alone. As part of the exercise we’ve been researching and delving into the mobile explosion and came up with some pretty amazing stats.
First, some general mobile trends
- There are currently 13.9 million mobile internet users in the UK. This figure is expected to rise to 17.3 million by 2012 and 18.6 million by 2013.
- Smartphone manufacturers shipped 100.9 million devices in Q4 2010, while PC manufacturers shipped 92.1m units worldwide. It’s the first quarter in which smartphones outsold PCs.
- It’s estimated that by 2015 more people will be browsing the web via a mobile than a desktop PC
Now some more specific stats based on what we’re seeing from our own restaurant clients:
- 400% rise in mobile traffic in the restaurant sector, year on year
- 12% of all restaurant traffic is now on a mobile device (that makes it more popular than IE7 or Google Chrome)
- 65% iPhone, 14% Android, 7% Blackberry, 7% Symbian
These stats even surprised us, especially the huge increase in mobile traffic from just one year ago. We’ve also seen a recent jump in Android visitors, doubling in just 6 months.
It’s still early days (we can’t quite claim world domination just yet!) but it’s continuing to be an interesting learning experience for us, and it’s quite exciting to launch a web app and then see it grow into a multi-language product being properly marketed in several countries at once.
