GOOD DESIGN:
Great Harvest Bakery Cafe
Overall Design:
Overall, I love the design. The colors are great. Even though it seems like it wouldn’t, the faded avocado green and white background, with black and dark maroon text fits well. I like the home page’s design, with the slideshow of some food products or wheat fields. They fit the theme and vibe of the company well. I also like the section in the middle of the home page, with the little blurbs of some of the site’s other pages. I like the fun little art images above those paragraphs.
Navigation:
The navigation is good. The header menu is clear. There are two drop-down menus in the header. When you select them, the items stay as a subheader for that page. That is very useful to navigate all the different pages and subpages.
Functionality:
All of the pages load quickly, except for the “Order Online” page. That one takes a little longer. For the “Order Online” page, as well as the “Buy a Franchise” page, they go to a whole other page separate from Great Harvest Bakery Cafe while staying in the same tab. Once in those two pages, you cannot return to the original site without the back tab arrow.
Content Quality:
There are a good amount of good pictures on the site. They are organized well for their respective pages. However, some of the images can be a little grainy or low resolution. The pages themselves have a lot of content and information on them. They seem to be very useful.
Site Effectiveness:
Overall, this website is pretty effective. It has a lot of good pages and content. The site has a few problems, especially with loading a new site in the same browser. However, the company is well served by this website.
POOR DESIGN:
Fresh Baked Café
https://www.freshbakedcafe.com
Overall Design:
I appreciate that the color scheme of the site follows the colors of the organization’s logo. That being said, the colors do not work. Having generic, bright blue and red doesn’t mesh. Those colors being text makes the site worse and hard to read. I also don’t like the bold white font put on the main image of the home screen. Without any image opacity, the text is hard to read. The fonts are a bit generic, but are fine. On the part of the home page showing the store locations, the site uses two different font sizes for the times open. They also do not capitalize the days of the week, which bothers me.
The images throughout seem a little random. They are split between menu graphics (maybe AI-generated?), outside storefront shots, and their foods. The pictures fit the site, but are disorganized.
Navigation:
The menu in the header is fine. It is very simple. There’s multiple buttons to go to the few pages.
Functionality:
There’s a drop-down menu for the “More” page on the header, but nothing comes up. It is just a blank black box. It feels like something should be there. The site and each of the pages load quickly, not that there is much to load anyways. When going to the page to order food from the store, it does not load.
Content Quality:
Frankly, there is not a lot of content on this website. It is very plain, showing mainly where the organization’s locations are and when the stores are open. On the “About” page, there is some text, but it kinda feels like nothing. There is not really anything there. I feel like something is missing from the page and site, to give it some life.
Site Effectiveness:
Overall, I really do not think this site is effective at all. It does not look good, and there’s not much to do on it. It isn’t attractive, and it’s very strong anti-marketing to customers.