The Melting Pot

Website:
http://www.meltingpot.com

Intended Audience:
Individuals interested in obtaining information about The Melting Pot fondue restaurants.

Usefulness of Content:
The website provides all of the essential information about The Melting Pot. Visitors to the website can make dinner reservations, view the menu, learn about banquet and special event arrangements, obtain a Google map, email the restaurant, read about The Melting Pot’s history, learn about franchising opportunities, and order seasonings, dressings, chocolate or gift cards. The most useful aspect of the website’s content is that the essential information is individualized and specific to each of the more than 100 Melting Pot locations in the U.S.

Consistency of Design:
The website contains impressive design characteristics and maintains their consistency throughout each web page remarkably well. The web page establishes a welcoming feeling on its home page with soothing music and an interactive photograph of restaurant patrons who turn and smile when the website visitor moves the mouse over floating fondue pots located on the page. The consistent use of fonts, text placement, logos, and photographs on the site’s other pages work together in harmony to further establish this welcoming feeling. Some minor variations to images are intentional, such as the fondue which changes from cheese to chocolate when the website user refreshes the screen for the “Fondue Club.” Such variations are creative and enhance the website’s design. The only fairly significant variations in the design appear on the individualized web pages for each Melting Pot location, but even these pages share the same basic structure and photos in almost every instance.

Ease of Navigation:
The designers have done an impressive job in making the website easy to navigate. The website contains a left-hand navigation bar that consists of five categories, which appear on each page. Topic areas relating to the five categories are clearly marked across the top of the respective category’s page. Information about individual restaurants in any state is very easy to locate by inserting a zip code or clicking on a State on a large U.S. map. Each page also requires little to no scrolling, which makes the content on each page easy to identify and read. In order to return to the homepage, visitors can click on the Melting Pot logo, but it would be better if the website also gave the visitor the option to click on a “Home” link. Other than that, MeltingPot.com is certainly one of the most thoughtfully designed and easy to navigate websites that I have ever encountered.