Cabin Tavern Website Redesign

The Cabin Tavern is a quirky bar in downtown Bellingham with a cabin in the mountains theme. Complete with taxidermy animals, a fake fireplace with glowing plastic log embers, gnomes and of course the best drink around, “The Boot”, a margarita served in a boot glass, of course. A place as whacky as Cabin Tavern needed a website to match their businesses one of a kind aesthetic.

Identifying Problem Areas

On the old Cabin Tavern website, the site was very minimal and lacked basic content that other competing bars in the area had on their websites such as food and drink menus, an about page, as well as location and hours. The website also lacked a theme and feeling of the bar’s overall brand.

Strategic Proposal + Website Goals

The goal of the new Cabin Tavern website will be to be clear, organized, and convey the brand/vibe of the Cabin Tavern more accurately; this will include sticking to brand guidelines and making the website pages more cohesive. We will keep it simple with a low page count and keep only the necessary information. Simple, clean, but with lots of personality.

1. Organization
The first part of the clarity goal will be organization of the website. This means making a user-friendly sitemap that is methodical and only includes the most relevant information. Most people visiting this website are looking for the menu, as the Cabin Tavern serves drinks and tacos. Making the website organization better will help potential customers find the information they are looking for and therefore increase potential customer satisfaction.
2. Branding
The second part of my clarity goal is to help the Cabin Tavern’s brand identity shine through it’s website. Helping people under- stand what the vibe of the bar is through the website will help let potential customers know what kind of place they are going to. At the moment, the website does not capture the interesting and fun atmosphere of Cabin Tavern.
My second goal for the new Cabin Tavern website was to push them into being a competitor with other bars in the Bellingham area.

Identifying Audience

I determined my target audience by observing the crowd that I saw at The Cabin when I visited in person for “research” and a marg. From my trip to The Cabin Tavern, I found that they have a more mature audience. The age range if individuals in the bar was pretty large, somewhere between 30 years old to 60 years old with some younger outliers like myself. With this in mind, I created two user personas based on the people I observed at the tavern, Jim and Samantha.