Tuesday, May 10, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/

One of the most visited sites on the Internet, the youtube site has at its core a very simple design. It's a site designed specifically for people to upload and watch streaming videos online. The simple design of the site come's as one of the site's main advantages, where it's main function--the search bar--comes as an extremely efficient tool, since very little else takes attention from it.

You can browse through the most current videos, or the most wildly seen and you have all of these different categories that helps you to pin-point videos of interest. The site has a hierarchy that makes sense, since it shows you movies that would be recommended for you and right bellow the "most popular" section, the spotlights are located on the upper right. The site's main page structure, is mostly composed of videos with their information, number of views and day of its post. When a video is clicked, the information on the video is brought up more thoroughly and there's an option to comment on it--very simple and straight forward.

You feel like most of the space is being used effectively, with very little to deviate the user towards other things not related with youtube. The site simply does what it's supposed to do extremely well.           

http://www.yahoo.com/

I haven't really visited Yahoo's site that much. But you can tell that the main page of the site is pretty straight forward. You have the main window, which shows the highlights of the site. Then a bit downward you can find the news.

The Web search bar seems to be a very significant part of Yahoo, since you can scroll through so many options within it. You have images, videos, local etc.--all options of the search bar. Then on the left of the page you can find numerous areas on the specific subjects of the site, mostly to do with entertainment.  

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

http://dictionary.reference.com/

It's easy to use. The various sections are self explanatory--thesaurus--once the user inputs a word. And the whole of these sections are divided by different color headings, which only helps the user further in its navigation of the site.

From the Translator section to the Quotes, everything in this site almost works flawlessly. It can help the user greatly when they need a certain translation from another language, to searching for that quote that you've had in your head for a while, but don't exactly remember the author.

The very design of the site is very straight forward and its most important feature couldn't be more elicited--a huge bar indicating the area where the user should write its word in. 

http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/

Hmm... yeah. Well the main page pretty much says everything. I just hope that whoever is visiting this site doesn't suffer from epilepsy, but the use of color in the site is horrendous. And this goes on through a lot of pages within the website itself. One click on the introduction page, I'm left wondering why the constant repeat of the rain sound-effect--if you can even call it that. The graphics are downright annoying. Almost the entirety of the site is simply a very good representation of what not to do if you want to keep your readers within your website pages.  
 

http://www.lingscars.com/index_min.php?status=pcp

A car lease site. There is some sense of organization with it, so my first reaction wasn't really has horrible as it could have been, but the colors are all off and it makes the whole experience extremely distracting.

Another huge problem found within it is the overabundance of information. I just clicked on a car to lease and scrolled down through most of the page... I really don't get why the need to put so much information in one page and most of the stuff in it, I'm still confused as what I should or should not be clicking.

The look of the site is also not very professional, it simply doesn't inspire much confidence.  

http://www.arngren.net/

I was overwhelmed the first time I got in site. I'm not even exactly sure right now what the site is for in the first place, but it seems to simply serve as a way where the consumer can buy and get a myriad of different items within it. That's pretty much what it seems to me.

I clicked on some of the items and everything works fine, but from a point of navigation or organization it's simply horrible.  

http://www.yogakitty.com/index.html

The title says it all really. Here is a site where Humans aren't the only species thought of when attempting to reach a higher level of consciousness.

I was navigating through it, doubting if the site was indeed serious, but it really isn't. The very design of the site is as simple as could be, and the little that was in there--especially the videos--provided me with a few laughs: That's pretty much what the site is going for, so it succeeded in that department from where I'm coming from. Outside of that the colors--the yellow--match with the subject of the site.