Hudson's on the Bend

http://hudsonsonthebend.com/main.php

Intended audience

• Well-heeled central Texas diners who might be interested in what some would consider road kill.
• The first problem I encountered when attempting to view the website is my laptop's lack of Flash 7, which meant that the entire site was initially unavailable to me. So the site is only viewable, if not intended, for those with Flash 7 and above.

Usefulness of content
The content is useful, if hard to find. Some elements are:

• Location, hours and directions
• Menus
• A store where you can purchase cookbooks
• Information regarding cooking classes
• There's even a letter from Lance Armstrong recommending Hudson's.

Consistency of design
The design is consistently awful. That's harsh, I know, but this site is possibly the most annoying one I've blogged about this semester, and that's saying _a lot_.

• First off, they use this horrible cooking/dining metaphor, so the main navigation bar is a series of hanging pans, and each pan is a link. It's not at all intuitive, so every once in a while, an arm wearing a mitt pops out and tells you to click on the pans. Then it retreats.
• The white text in a small font on a bright red background is hard to read, but is consistently used.
• The store opens in a new window, but the cooking school and menus open in the parent window.
• The main course menu does not actually fit on their menu graphic, so the text scrolls off the menu. I would think this would be a major destination for this site, so it gives the entire site an amateurish feel.

Ease of navigation

• As mentioned before, the pans are not intuitive as a navigation device, and it's not clear what each one represents, so you have to mouse over them which causes them to swing back and forth and finally display some labels.
• This site's pages takes ages to load, and they re-load every time you scroll back to a previous page.
• To get to the last page in the menu, the site scrolls through every page in the menu. So if I want to see desserts, I have to watch the appetizer, salad, and main course pages scroll past first. This actually makes the site less functional and more time-consuming than a real menu would be.

After much trouble, I've determined that using my $25 off coupon to Hudson's will hardly put a dent into the price of dinner for 2, so it won't be worth using. However, I remain curious as to whether the food is better than the website. At $48 a plate, let's hope so.