Café Heart is a wonderful cafe recently opened at the side of the market in Scarborough's old town. I love it because its got lots of vegetarian options and the food's different, freshly prepared in front of you, and delicious.
This project is a facelift of the previous site (click for a screenshot). The client wanted to add a little more spirit to the existing site.
I took the photographs on a very busy lunchtime so only had seconds to photograph meals as they flew past.
The look of the site was achieved collaboratively, with the client choosing colours, the heart logo, the emphasis phrases and obviously the menu content, while I worked on the menu, grid layout and implementation.
This was not only urgent for a publicity deadline, but also to a ridiculously tight timeframe such that all I've really been able to do is put the site together as best I can. There are lots of things I'd improve, but by setting a very tight budget what the client's got is all the key elements they want without spending money on incidentals, so I can certainly see advantages to their method. It reminds me of an American client who had the view that if you bought an hour of an experts time, you got their best hour: the key nuggets, and in each subsequent hour, although you paid the same rate, you were getting less and less value for money. One consequence of this, from my point of view, is I just have to go with my best judgment each time, there's no time for testing or considering alternatives. So the layout is my first idea, the top image is the first one I created.
The original site that established the menu online along with free hosting (it's only a page, after all), and a domain name was done perhaps nine months ago, took three hours and cost £160. Later, they made some amendments to the menu which cost another £110. This latest upgrade, menu amendments and photographs took almost twelve hours so needed about £480.
The client said "we really like it. thank you".
Update 20 October 2006: The website was one of the considerations that helped Café Heart win Cafe of the Year at the Yorkshire Tourism Awards ceremony.
