My my my Aqui, don’t you look fabulous! It’s our pleasure to announce the launch of Aqui’s new website. Working with our client we wanted to come up with a design that’s soothing, fresh, artistic, and, of course, eye catching. We were given the challenge of keeping the original logo, colors and background images from their old site, and we built up from there. The final result was a very happy client and another design we’re proud to add to our portfolio.
More About Aqui
Aqui is uniquely known for their natural, wild, organic menu, and let’s not forget their “feet tingling” Industrial Strength Margaritas™, Swirls™ and new Martini Swirls™. Starting back in 1994, A renowned chef, known for creating innovative inspired California cuisine, and an experienced fast food operator joined together. The fast food operator gave the chef a simple challenge: “Create fine dining food using the flavors of the Southwest, Asia, California and Latin America. We will match the food with gorgeous decor and fill the place with art. Then, we’ll add order-at-the counter service to make it hassle free. And above all, we will make it affordable.”
And on April 11, 1994, the first Aqui Cal-Mex restaurant was introduced in Willow Glen. In all, Aqui now has four locations in the San Jose Area. Each has its own unique flavor, with one of a kind custom artwork from local artists.
about the Development and Design
The bulk of what makes this project great is its foundation. We worked very closely with the team at Aqui Cal-Mex to come up with a design both unique and appealing to their taste. At Aqui, it’s all about the spectacular food, and we had to make that front and center. Every page at aquicalmex.com has a unique design tailored to the content for the given page. We wanted to make sure visiting the website was just as much of an experience as it is when you visit one of the Aqui locations to grab a bite to eat.
Developing Aqui was an absolute blast! The team here loved the opportunity to actually taste the food while we were developing the site. There’s nothing quiet like coding a food menu for Aqui while eating the food at the same time. Don’t worry, we keep our keyboards clean here at TrevNet. One of the challenges for coding this website was giving each page that fresh look, so as you’re browsing the website, you don’t get bored. We were able to do this and still deliver the content the customer may be looking for when visiting the site.
While we’re on the topic of the menu pages at Aqui Cal-Mex, let’s point out some of the features here. We know the menu can seem intimidating, especially when you’re not sure what to get! So we added a “jump to” menu button that lets you go right to a specific type of food on the menu.
We’ve got a multi-column menu with nice clean text in an organized list. Thanks to WordPress, we were able to easily set up this page so the team at Aqui Cal-Mex could keep it up to date. You can be sure that any time you visit the website to look at the menu, you’ll see the latest and greatest!
One of the pages we had a lot of fun developing was the Experience Aqui page. This page is an interactive design that allows you to navigate the site in a different kind of way. Simply mouse over over the pictures and get a quick textual description, click it and it will take you to the specific page!
When you’re ready to head over to one of the Aqui Cal-Mex Locations, check out the location page. We absolutely love the Google Maps integration with the page. On this page, you can click on each location to get more information, or just use the map at the top. If you need to see what the restaurant hours are or maybe some extra information when finding it, clicking on the location will show a modal with more information.
It’s Mobile Ready!
A large portion of the traffic at the Aqui website is coming from a mobile platform. Whether that be from your phone or a tablet, we wanted to make sure the website looked great! The whole site was developed to be a responsive design, which means the website and its content will adapt to the size of the display and render only what’s needed, depending on the platform. For Aqui Cal-Max, we really had the ability to be innovative with with the website on a mobile platform like the iOS or Android powered smart phones. We created a pull out (via tap) sidebar menu that lets anyone easily browse the site.
In Closing
One of the perks we had experienced when designing for this client is the delicious food they provided us as inspiration for their site. Ever since, we’ve been hooked. If you haven’t been to Aqui yet I suggest you add it to your list of places to try; it really is an experience you have to try for yourself. After many visits we have never been disappointed. With fresh food, affordable prices and an amazing atmosphere, now accompanied with a awesome new website – Aqui is going places!