My First Project

East of the Mississippi Diner

If you were to ask anyone what Milton bonds over with anyone, he would quickly say food. The flavor profiles, prep, and execution are what keeps customers coming back. When it comes to web development, my argument would be that the different designs, preparation, and execution are what makes a website unique as well as engaging with customers too. That's what we wanted for the East of the Mississippi Diner.

My aunt and uncle's restuarant has been in business since I was a young teenager, and they have always been a southern cuisine staple in the Birmingham community. With the amazing breakfast and cafeteria-style serving line, my mind instantly went to developing a website for them considering the World Games were coming to town, and with the flooding of phone calls they receive daily, I thought that having a website that brought more traffic to dine-in, instead of calling in would better enhance the culture there.

For this website I used a one-page website approach with the links on the navigation bar direct you to different parts of that one page. For example you click on the Menu link, and the page scrolls down to the menu section where you can view the menus. I found that to be the best solution considering the simplicity of the website itself. There isn't an online ordering extension to the website, I didn't see a reason to have different pages for this particular website. There's a image carousel that presents a slide show of dishes they serve, as well as any events that are happening locally. I wanted to make sure that the physical location to the website can also be found so traffic can go from the website to the door whether it's dine-in or phone order, so I have the address embedded in the footer and it will take you to Google Maps to direct you to the restaurant, as well as the phone number so you can make a call with one tap.

The most important part for this website as well as any website nowadays is its responsiveness. Can it provide a great user experience on any device? I would say working on those details took the most time because you don't want to take anything away from what the goal of the website is, in this case giving customers (both current and potential) a hard time navigating a website they shouldn't. I can say that at first the responsiveness was terrible due to the fact I developed this website on a 27" monitor and I never checked for responsiveness until I deployed and looked a the website on my phone and shouted "Oh Lord". Even if your CSS is a responsive one, be sure to test everything out on all window sizes of your browser to make sure everything looks and performs the way it should.

All in all this website was one that I thoroughly enjoyed and there will be updates coming along the way to make the experience even better. Feel free to browse the pictures you see as well as their website East of the Mississippi Diner.