Project Name: Uncle Joes Texas Steakhouse Restaurant
Skills: XHTML, CSS, MYSQL, PHP, Photoshop, Flash
Background: My project ‘Uncle Joes Texas Steakhouse Restaurant’ was subject to a number of stages of process in order to become the final fully working Web-based artefact that it is; from conducting market research, to designing on paper the website’s structure, wireframe and basic look, through to the moulding of it within Adobe Dreamweaver to the final implementation of PHP dynamic coding to deliver the finished article.
My basic brief given to me in Week One of the module demanded that I research, design and build a PHP/MYSQL powered website on the subject of a Restaurant which could be any type of Restaurant of my choosing, the website had to look and feel professionally made, the “owner” of this website had to be able to edit, delete, create entries in to the Restaurant’s menu through the website which would update and link back to the MYSQL database and finally an attempt at a booking system for customers was also mentioned as a final area to consider developing.
I began to plan out my project’s strategy so I could check back on this throughout the 13 weeks to make sure that I was on the right track in relation to the developing process and my first port of call was to delve in to some research of the existing online Restaurant presences on the World Wide Web. I of course had to come to some form of decision around what kind of restaurant I wanted to focus on and I eventually went for an American themed Steakhouse, this was due to the fact that on a recent holiday abroad to the USA, me and my family frequented and ate in these exact types of restaurants and I thought it would be a nice idea to link this back to my University work.
I used search engines in order to locate some suitable looking websites that would start to aid me in compiling a design for my website, the more I searched the more I found a substantial volume of Steakhouses in the ‘Southern States’ like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Oklahoma and most predominately the ‘Lone Star’ state of Texas, it turned out that Texas was quite famous for this style of cookery and this led me to base my Restaurant in this area of the United States.
I decided that to make the website feel as real as possible I wanted to base it in an existing location within Texas; after opting for the city of San Antonio I came across completely by chance The Riverwalk, which is a real area of restaurants, bars and party complexes, set in beautiful surroundings alongside the San Antonio river and I just thought it would be great to pretend that Uncle Joes (my restaurant) was part of this exciting development and photos of The Riverwalk I decided would be good to put in my flash banner to advertise the restaurant’s location as well as the food it had to offer and they also feature in static image banners I created on my Menu page. My Restaurant’s address features a San Antonio ZIP code.
The website features extensive use of PHP and features a booking system I wrote, click below to view the finished piece.
