Background

From humble corner store to becoming one of the largest restaurants on the West Coast, San Pedro Fish Market and Restaurant provides its customers with a truly incredible seafood experience. Managing to consistently gain popularity each year since opening its doors in 1956, as well as attaining worldwide recognition for its unparalleled seafood production and dining experience, the San Pedro Fish Market brand is rapidly expanding with no sign of slowing down. Today, San Pedro Fish Market seats nearly 3,000 customers, holds 4 Guinness World Records, offers an impressive array of seafood options, and will soon be celebrating the opening of three additional fast, casual grilles.

Scope

With overwhelming success and dedication to constantly progressing the brand forward, San Pedro Fish Market brought on A3 Creative to help develop a stronger online presence through a newly redesigned website built to not only promote the company’s exciting growth, but support its booming online commerce, share the company’s rich history, and breathe new life into the brand through fun, engaging, and contemporary design. This was an absolutely fundamental aspect of the project, seeing as the overarching purpose for the website reached far beyond simply advertising for the company’s restaurant, but more importantly to serve as a one stop destination for all things San Pedro Fish Market. With strong focus on becoming a mobile-first platform, A3 had to consider all aspects of web development and design in order to create a responsive, intuitive, and streamlined website.

Process

Research:

Like the beginning to any creative endeavor, the process began with thorough research of the client company and the people that embody it, as well as acquiring a fundamental understanding of the client’s vision for the project. This step is absolutely crucial to the process, as it paves the way to a positive client/agency relationship, and ultimately, serves as the foundation to creating a great product.

Site Architecture:

After diving into the original San Pedro Fish Market site in order to analyze its strengths and comprehend its weaknesses, it is time to begin conceptualizing the website’s architecture, focusing on how a user will interact and flow through it. This step provides an easy to understand visual representation of the website in its simplest form, and serves as the base upon which the site is created.

Wire Framing:

Once the site architecture is set into place, and all desired pages and links accounted for, the next step in the development process is wireframing. This key step provides a skeletal structure for the site, showcasing basic page layout, as well as general placement of design elements such as images and copy, without delving into any design details or specifics.

Comprehensives:

The next step in the process is when the fun really begins. Once the site architecture is approved and wireframes fleshed out, it is time to begin creating design comprehensives of the website. Thinking about the site stylistically in terms of look and feel, this is when the overall aesthetic of the website is shaped, and detailed design elements like typography and photography are implemented.

Prototyping:

Once the design comprehensives are finalized, in the case of a web project such as this, it is always helpful to give the client an opportunity to interact with the site through a high fidelity prototyping tool such as InVision. This allows the client to view site as if it were live, without having to wait through any development stages.

Developing:

Lastly, arguably the most important and complex step in a web project, is the actual building of the site. Though much of this step happens in tandem with the design process, development is when the web developer takes the design comprehensives provided by the designers, and brings them to life through super secret magic coding abilities. With comprehensives as a strong visual reference, web development is the process of taking a 2 dimensional design, and creating code that will ultimately become a live, interactive website.

Launch

The final product for this project was embodied by a fully re-designed, responsive, and user-focused website that included brand boosting features like blog posting, live photo streaming, and ecommerce functionality. Beyond the product itself, client relationships are a valued aspect of our creative workflow here at A3, and the one we’ve made through collaborating with the wonderful people at San Pedro Fish Market and Restaurant is no exception. Do yourselves a favor and check them out at sanpedrofish.com, on social media, or in person at any of their beautiful restaurant and grille locations!