Tapas Chain Website: Serving Up Ambiente’s Online Refresh

Project Overview

If you live in North Yorkshire you’ll have undoubtedly heard of the popular tapas chain Ambiente Tapas. Launched in 2007, they have five sites; three in York, one in Leeds and one in Hull.

Ambiente approached me for a website redesign with a few goals; to reflect their upcoming visual identity refresh, bring increased visibility to their online shop, generate excitement and anticipation from diners about their restaurant visit and generally give the structure, look and feel and content delivery a much-needed spruce-up and overhaul. It went without saying that the site needed to ensure that it was easy to book a table, either online or through other customer service channels. The Ambiente brand personality was well-defined through existing online material so I was keen to deliver content on the new site in the same friendly, welcoming tone of voice.

The site gets a lot of visits and the overwhelming majority of them are from mobile users, so the important content (restaurants, menus, reservations, contact details) needed to be easily accessible on smaller screens.

As part of the content overhaul, I suggested that behind-the-scenes information on the menu and drinks selection, cooking methods, staff training, and overall expertise and enthusiasm in providing an exceptional experience be included on the site. This would aid in the anticipation and create a welcoming atmosphere for diners who weren’t too familiar with tapas whilst providing interesting background information on the restaurants and what drives the teams to deliver a fantastic experience for diners.

Ambiente has a great reputation for providing amazing food and excellent customer service so I was also keen to illustrate this by including customer comments throughout the site.

As well as providing menu and restaurant information, the site also needed to house an events, blog and news section and I took the opportunity to separate news content from evergreen blog content and streamline the presentation of events.

As mentioned previously, one of the goals of the redesign was to increase the visibility of their online store that currently sells gift cards and wine and sherry gift sets. I redesigned the store structure and navigation to provide a streamlined shopping experience for visitors and to showcase the store’s offerings better.

The result of the redesign is a vibrant, on-brand, content-rich site that makes important information easy to find, reservations easy to book and items easier to purchase while providing interesting background information and a sense of anticipation for visitors who have time to dig a bit deeper and browse the site.

"A massive shoutout to Colin Boyter for collaborating on this project and taking the ideas and brief from multiple people and being able to channel them into a beautiful new site. The result is a website that truly reflects our fun, vibrant, and welcoming brand personality."

Ambiente Tapas LinkedIn Post