The Selva Grill has been a cornerstone restaurant in Sarasota, Florida since early 2005. Having gone through many challenges and changes over the years, 2021 saw the expansion of Selva to the new “University Towne Center”’ (UTC) location. This brought with it the need for a new website. Since the restaurant’s inception, Selva has presented a sleek and elegant vibe to the public. To this end, we set out to build a website that accurately mirrored that atmosphere.
Selva Grill Objectives & Challenges
Objectives
The purpose of this project was to create a more contemporary and photo-forward website with a faster and easier multi-platform functionality. We were able to do this by highlighting the new UTC site, clearly distinguishing the two different locations and their respective details (address, hours, contact, etc).
Keeping this organic website sophisticated was brought about by efficiently and tastefully producing the following:
- Displaying the CTA’s (calls to action) and informative highlights in a cohesive way.
- Ensuring a highly functional yet classy mobile experience. (The usability of the website is easily navigational via desktop, tablet, and phone.)
- Supplementing existing photo repository with new, custom photography.
- Recreating custom forms such as:
- Ordering gift cards.
- Submitting job applications.
Challenges
Some of the challenges that presented themselves with this project were expected while others were more novel. As with all restaurant website building, being able to organize and display a menu in a stylish way is a difficult assignment to undertake. However, with this project, we were tasked with having to do this with three different menus! Needless to say, we had our work cut out for us.
Another primary challenge was in organizing and organically displaying a multitude of informative points in the following ways:
- Multiple location information for each physical Selva location.
- A series of calls to action for the visitor entering the website.
- Fashionably incorporating a variety of awards where each location would have its own organizational logos with separate graphics.
Project Components & Highlights
for Selva Grill Website Design
Efficient and Elegant Information Layouts
As noted before, our main focus with this project was to provide a refined, useful, and systematic access to information and presentation. We did this by completing the following:
- Home Page Header Locations – We created space-efficient location displays that provided information in custom dropdown boxes. This information was able to encompass contact, address info, hours, a button to make reservations, and a button to open each location on Google Maps.
- Home Page Hover Accordion – We developed a space that was code efficient through a hover-activated accordion for calls to action, advertising reservations, happy hour, late-night menus, gift card purchasing, and live music.
- Global Footer Awards Section – We designed a standard graphic presentation for each award that revealed the logo graphic when hovering over it.
- Global Header Location Dropdown – The header on the Home page is unique from all other pages in that it has a location dropdown toggle. Since the other pages don’t have this we created another dropdown toggle in the secondary navigation along the top that would fulfill the same type of function.
Image Slider
Because everything about Selva Grill is visually appealing from the food to the drinks, to the environment we built an image slider for the home page that rotates through a selection of images to present the upscale atmosphere of the restaurant. This is sure to be the first thing that will catch a visitor’s eye.
Multi-Functional Images
Most food images on a restaurant’s website perform a single function – to present an image of the food. But, what if the visitor wants to know what the dish itself is? Many website designers will then use image captions; however, too much information in a caption gets cluttered, resulting in a clunky visual presentation.
So, to fix this we decided to build a hover effect for some of the images. This way when a visitor hovers over the image, they will then get a wealth of information about the dish in a clear-cut way and will be provided with a link to the actual menu.
Selva Grill Visual Menu
Because the food at Selva is so vividly appealing, we created a visual menu that has high-quality photographs of the main courses.
Custom Forms
One of the forms we redesigned was a job application. This form emails the essential information to the Selva managers. However, we wanted to only present the managers with the necessary information in the email (and not the entire form itself.) So, we created conditional fields within the form that are only displayed and required if the applicant selects certain other fields. The resulting email to the managers will then only send the relevant information about the applicant, making the job application process a lot smoother for everyone.
