We Encourage Engrained Cafe

All businesses use websites to create a sense of validation for themselves as well as their customers, making web design an extremely important factor to their success. Engrained Cafe is a local restaurant located on the Arizona State University Tempe campus, third level of the Memorial Union, and is becoming a popular feature on campus. A main contributor to this restaurant’s growing popularity would be its highly effective website. With a user friendly web design, enticing images of their dishes, and interactive and detailed features explaining their goals and morals, Engrained makes users crave their products just from the website alone.

Engrained Cafe’s website sucks users in almost instantly. The high quality, vivid images of the restaurants food products are mouth-watering and enticing; they keep the user begging for more. From the spicy shrimp pizza to the baked rigatoni, Engrained offers an abundance of delicious entrees made from all locally grown products. The website’s extremely effective visuals are complemented with stimulating colors as well as a simple layout. The main color present on the website is orange.  Color psychology describes orange to be associated with warmth and organic products. This is extremely fitting considering Engrained’s priorities revolve around natural ingredients. Also, there are light green accents on the website. Green represents a sense of calm, peace, nurturing and support. These colors complement each other and work together to create an inviting and friendly vibe, which appeals to all website users. All of the tabs located on Engrained’s homepage have labels that are direct and concise, while in a readable font and text color. There is no searching for information; everything is right in front of the users eyes with the most effective information--like the restaurants hours, menu, etc--in the middle of the front page. 

One of the main aspects Engrained Cafe is that it was created with the goal to be eco-friendly and to use localized ingredients in its products. The restaurant's use of  sustainability and conservation of resources is demonstrated on the website through an interactive diagram that shows where energy is being used efficiently and where materials are being reused and recycled. Also, the website includes six intentions of the Cafe summarizing it’s goals towards reducing the environmental footprint.  

Although the website is effective, there is still room to improve. When visiting the “Brand Story & 6 Intentions” portion of the website, there are six separate links present. When a link is clicked on, it branches out into a completely separate and inconvenient PDF file. By the time the user has read all six intentions, they will have six separate, unnecessary tabs to shuffle through. Within these files, there are simple spelling errors such as “wast” which is intended to be “waste”. Such small errors should not have been overlooked; it makes the company seem unprofessional as well as unintelligent. Engrained could fix this annoyance by creating a sole page completely dedicated to its six intentions that is complimented with orange and brown accents.

 Overall, Engrained Cafe’s website is effective to promoting its products as well as providing users with a smooth website experience. With the use of high resolution images of its mouth watering food, its no wonder that this business is becoming more successful by the year. Despite the few areas where improvement is needed, Engrained Cafe’s friendly and inviting website appeals to all who come across it.