Beyond tweaking fonts, colors, and layout for a free San Francisco dining guide website—Yum Yum Map— designer Kevin Lane added helpful features in the site’s redesign. The improvements should help generate potential advertising dollars, build a loyal customer base, and provide added interaction for the users at the site. As requested by KC Communications’ partner Kim Carlson, Lane modified Yum Yum Map’s existing branding and home page “to generate a lively, interesting look that would motivate people to use the site and buy ad space.” He also added new sections to help sustain the site’s viability.

Lane reworked the existing logo with the original theme in mind, but at an increased size and with a new font, Trebuchet, for visibility on screen. He added a heavy outline and drop shadow to ensure legibility over colorful background photos and art. Lane’s color palette takes its cue from Yum Yum Map’s vivid logo. “There are so many colors available in the food palette, leaving the options wide open,” he says.

The existing, one-page site needs to be categorized into different sections for user friendliness and search-engine optimization (SEO) purposes. Lane added menu pages in his redesign that—as individual pages now—can generate “massive SEO benefits, expanding the keyword base of the site,” he says. “This expands the organic growth on search engines by building out multiple pages and categorizing each menu section by type, making the site appear much deeper to search engines. The drop-down menu on this page is another way to navigate to each individual page as well, and all menus can be built into cascading style sheets (CSS) and JavaScript, keeping SEO friendliness in mind.”

To build customer loyalty, Lane added a newsletter that can relay news and additions as the site expands. Other new sections: a featured restaurants page, interactive map page, site map, and FAQs. To complete this tasteful website redesign, the newsletter signup and archive remain constants at the bottom of each page.

1. Original site Consisting simply of one page with links of featured restaurants, Yum Yum Map needs a tasty new look to drive users and advertisers to the site.
2. New logo The reworked logo is similar to the original, but Lane increased size for visibility and repositioned the word map so that it better connects with the logo. He added an outline and drop shadow to aid visibility when the logo is placed over visual elements, such as quality photography and art.
3. Fonts Lane chose Trebuchet MS for the logo. It’s crisp and clean on screen. He also used the News Gothic family for navigation, headers, and buttons, and Verdana for text.
4. Colors The designer played off the logo colors to tie the site and its navigation together, keeping the theme fun and colorful.
5. Featured sponsors and restaurants This page initially lists chosen sites that are “top” or “hot” picks, and could eventually be converted to another form of advertising, offering the restaurants high visibility at the site.
6. Interactive map A flash-based map allows users to navigate a chosen area by interacting with the control panel on the map. Icons call attention to all of the locations on the map and mouse-over icons provide the user with further details, as well as the ability to make reservations online.
7. Photography Lane incorporated photos that tie in the logo’s colors. Food offers a smorgasbord of colors, and is a suitable way to start an image search. All images from www.jupiterimages.com.
8. Global elements “Adding navigation to Yum Yum Map was a key component to expanding the depth of the site,” explains Lane. “The original single page consisted mainly of images, losing out on the search engine optimization (SEO) benefits of a content-rich website.”