Case Study (back to portfolio)
Jillian's Indianapolis gave us an unique perspective for a restaurant site. As a company, Jillian's focuses on three aspects for their business: Award winning food, thirst quenching drinks and entertainment (for the kid and adult in all of us). Not only does Jillian's offer a restaurant to their cliential, but they also have multiple bars, a bowling alley, billiards, arcade games and banquet rooms for individual or group entertainment. They wanted to promote all of these features that make Jillian's an attractive destination. As a company, they were looking for something sexy and expandable. Seeing that Drupal is expandable by default, we had to prove that we could make Drupal sexy.
The first task for the site was to create an attractive design. The design was inspired by the night-time lights of the marquee. The marquee was a visual element that is linked with Jillian's throughout the Indianapolis area. It also works well with the fun-and-games aspect of the company.
One of the challenges with the design was to work the Eat, Drink, & Play links in the navigation. These elements are part of Jillian's branding, so it is constantly present with the logo, and often considered part of it. With these same elements being required as menu items, we new that it would be effective to incorporate it as both part of the logo and menu links. We build these links into the template files for that reason - it was part of the branding and will probably never change.
The calendar had to be set up to list events, promotions, and specials. Having "Daily Specials" and monthly promotions required different handling than the standard events. If we listed them in the calendear, there would be multiple repeated listings every day. We didn't want to remove it from the calendar because it was very useful on different calendar views like the Daily or Weekly views. Our solution was to list these items in the sidebar to allow more emphasis on the weekly concerts and events. We used 1 View that was a duplicated calendar view and made all the blocks with that view (including the home page "Daily Specials") and displayed it with Contexts so we could export the entire calendar and displays in 1 neat little feature.
In an effort to bring users back to both the restaurant and the website, Jillian's wanted to have an online photo gallery. This would allow them to take pictures during big events downtown and in time run specials for patrons who find their photo online. We incorporated an image gallery strategy brought to our attention by Jeff Eaton of the Lullabots. This strategy was to use an image content type and a gallery content type, but then tie them together with Views Attach and Node Reference URL. Using this approach allows for what we feel is the optimal flexibility with both images and galleries. It allows us to handel both how ever we want without losing the 'photo gallery' perception.
The last main feature of the Jillian's site so far is the Menu section (menu as in food, not navigation). We needed to display the Jillian's menu in a way that was "future forward", or in other words - a format with the maximum flexibility and expandability. We utilized Neil's module, Taxonomy Menu, and used that in 2 displays - Food and Drinks. We used 2 taxonomies for the menu items. 1 was for the categories in which the food falls (used for the Taxonomy Menu). The second was for Tags for the food. This way they would be able to tag foods with different features, like "hot and spicey" or even with the types of dishes, like "chicken" or "beef". By putting these in a free-tagging taxonomy, the employees can add as many descriptive tags as they feel are necessary for the food. These can then be "exposed" in a view so users browsing the menu can organize the food based on the features that they are looking for.
To help organize the menu, we installed Node Order to allow the site manager to have control of the placement of the menu items. Because of this, the manager can log, navigate to the menu, and adjust the order of the items similar to that of your Movie Que on Blockbuster's website. There are buttons right here that allows each item to "Move Up" or "Move Down" and in this case push the menu items with pictures to the top.
