This Saturday, the Houston Advertising Federation hosted its annual Addy Awards. Among the MMI projects nominated for an award were the websites for Sugar Land Town Square and Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille.
A lifelong resident of Fort Bend County, I’ve witnessed firsthand the massive growth of the county, and Sugar Land in particular. I have been a frequenter of Sugar Land Town Square since the first businesses opened in 2002, including Perry’s. Our lead designer, Brian Lee, is also a resident of Sugar Land. Needless to say, both of these sites were built with love.
With the Sugar Land Town Square redesign, we streamlined a myriad of homepage banners, promos, and information into a clean, aesthetically pleasing home page. The latest promos are contained in an interactive flash element, and users can vote for the latest “Movie Under the Moon”, sign up for the newsletter, or navigate to other areas of the site, all without a scroll of the mouse. A couple technologies we implemented in this site are a RSS (Real Simple Syndicate) feed for users to subscribe to retailer coupons and a backend CMS (Content Management System), which allows our client to manage their event listings. Both of these systems are time sensitive so that expired coupons and past event dates are automatically removed from the site, ensuring all information is accurate and timely.
Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille is the flagship restaurant for Perry’s Restaurants. There are six locations in the Houston area, including Sugar Land Town Square, one in downtown in Austin, and coming this spring, one in Dallas’ uptown area. 
If you haven’t been, go and get the pork chop, it’s epic. With many locations, and varying menus and components for each location, sitemapping was critical element of the development. Sitemapping is the process of organizing the site’s pages and structure, similar to building a floor plan for a house or laying out the chapters of a book. We implemented many ways to navigate the site and each location essentially has it’s own microsite within the framework of the whole site, so that information such as private dining is specific and relevant to each restaurant. The menus, unlike some restaurant websites, are built within the site and broken down by categories, as well as offering a printable PDF. Offering users multiple ways to navigate and access information is always a key component of a functional website.
With Sugar Land Town Square and Perry’s Steakhouse, we believe we accomplished the task of creating well-designed and functional websites, and we hope all of the sites’ visitors agree. When the voters/judges of the Addys like them as well, then that’s just icing on the cake.
