The news website that I’ve reviewed is The Guardian web site. The first thing I noticed when I opened the home page is the amount of color they used. Like many newspaper sites they’ve kept a white background; they chose a cadet blue for their headers and black for their body text, which keep it simple. However, each of the section links on the top navigation bar has a different color, which was distracting, especially since some of the words don’t necessarily sync with their color associations. Even more distracting were the color bars across the top of photo links. While the gray bars on the secondary photos were acceptable, the bright red on the main one was jarring. The home page is full of images, but none are extremely large; however, I think that this is acceptable on a splash page. The treatment of photos within an article is fairly standard for a newspaper; the photograph is featured at the top of the page and is approximately 450 pixels wide.
The guardian website is rather successful as far as navigation. The user can pick a larger section and subsections of those. All navigation is available at the top of each page. The most helpful element of their navigation is that they display links that show each step the user has made so they never have to use the back button to get to the previous page.
One aspect that disappointed me was their “interactive guides” section under Multimedia. I specifically thinking of the “How I paint” guides, which is made up of slideshows that have a start and stop button and little written explanation. I would have preferred to have audio or roll-over elements. Otherwise, the name is slightly misleading in that it doesn’t show the process.
Ultimately, the guardian website is a very successful news website. Their treatment of navigation is very intuitive for the user, and may be useful to incorporate into my website.
No comments:
Post a Comment