Sunday, October 21, 2007

Casa De Luz [a gathering place and vegan dining in Austin]

http://www.casadeluz.org/index.htm

Intended audience
People who are interested in healthy life style, including diet and exercises
(vegan, yoga practitioners, etc).

Usefulness of content
Useful, but some information is not organized well.
The archive for the past daily menu served at the restaurant is one of the problems. It has no recipe. Thinking about the intended target, it may be a good idea that more recipes are introduced. They are selling their cookbook so they may not want to reveal the details. However, it is possible and appreciated, for example, showing the list of foods, basic guide for vegan cooking (e.g., how to prepare soup stock for vegans). Also it is strange that only one meal is categorized as “Mexican Lunch, “ but other 360 meals are classified as “uncategorized.” It is not kind to viewers if they really want to appeal the variety of their meals.

Consistency of design
Consistent, the color choice is sophisticated, matched to the brand image of Casa De Luz. Font size is also appropriate.

Ease of navigation
Generally easy. However, it may viewers confused that some information is listed in several places, such as “Live Music” and “Macrobiotics.” An interesting point in this website is that some archive pages, “Daily Menu (under ‘Dining at Casa’),” “Live Music,” and “Casa De Luz blog” are linked to W3C Markup Validation Service (under ‘Meta, Valid XHTML’). Viewers can see if the site is validated and in fact, “Live” and “blog’ are validated, but “Menu” is invalidated with 171 errors. The web designer / owner seem to be aware of web accessibility, then, why Casa De Luz leaves them alone without corrections? (Also I am curious why not all the pages are linked to the W3C page.) In addition, as of now I do not know if viewers should be accessible from the webpages to the W3C validation page like Casa De Luz, although webmasters should make sure of it before uploading the site.

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