Digital Agency London | Website Development London | Website Design Company | Catch Digital

Visit project

• goodlifediner.com

Creative

• Website Design
• Flash Design

Development

• Papervision 3D
• Flash
• CMS integration
• Google Maps API
• PHP/MySQL
• Zend Framework AMF
• XML

Analysis

• Google Analytics (Flash)

Objective

The Diner offers a unique dining experience at five locations in some of the busiest parts of London. Bottomless coffee and a bar stocked with a large range of beers (on tap!) and cocktails mixed with a great range of typically American food makes for a guaranteed great time.

With big expansion plans and a fifth location, on Islington's Essex Road, the Diner required a website which showed prospective patrons what they can expect when visiting one of the venues. The prime objective was to showcase the Diner's unique offering of great food and drink in an environment that has been meticulously designed to be all at once homely, cutting-edge, fun and ultimately fulfilling.

Along with communicating the wide range of food and drink you'll find in the restaurants, the website needed to get over a feel of their music policy which enhances the overall dining experience you can expect in these unique restaurants.

The Approach

As the Diner offers classic American dining with a modern twist, Catch proposed a website that put the visitor right in the middle of The Diner, surrounding them an experience as close as possible to actually sitting one of the venues. Using Papervision 3D, a framework for using 3D objects in Flash , an online version of The Diner Soho's interior was created. Elements in the 3D world are taken straight from The Diner itself, from the wall texture to the large isometric light fittings. Using Papervision 3D's engine the whole scene reacts to the users mouse movements.

Each of the objects in the main scene leads to one main sections creating an explorative environment which keeps the visitors interest. The subsections also mirror the movement style of the main scene again making use of the Papervision engine.

Parts of the site are content managed through a custom built CMS which interacts with the Flash directly, allowing The Diner management to change promotions and update their menus. Flash and PHP integration was achieved using the ZEND Framework which allows Flash to pull data from a central database.

As music is such an important part of The Diner's experience the music playing in one of The Diner's was linked up to Last.fm. Installing a widget in the venues themselves links up the music playing live to the website, allowing the user to view recently played tracks, the top 10 artists and tracks and also see what is playing at that very moment. Those with Eagle eyes may have spotted that the record sleeve on the homepage evens changes to reflect the track that is playing live in the restaurant!

Result