Week 4, Part I Blog Post

Gates and Fences: Flaws and Possible Improvements

There are several aspects of the Gate and Fences website that need to be improved. For one thing, this website does not possess a secure address, and a secure website address (https) should be added to this website so that visitors can feel safer about protected from hackers. In addition, the website does not currently possess a search box/bar for visitors to look up specific services or items. A search box that leads to indexed pages should be added to the website in order to help visitors navigate around it more effectively. Unfortunately, this website has very little aesthetic appeal.  The background looks very unflattering with the light gray text boxes, and seems to sort of blend with the light gray text boxes, which makes the text on this website harder to read. There are too many different font colors on individual pages, which make web pages look overly busy and hard to read. In order to improve this website’s aesthetic appeal, perhaps only one or two font colors at most should be featured on this website. Otherwise, each page looks too “busy” for the human eye. In addition, the header at the top of the page is crammed with too much information, and it would be better if this company’s short summary of its services were placed below the header. This would make the website look more professional, organized, and easier to read.  There are lots of typos and grammatical errors on this website. I believe that the easiest way to improve it to eliminate all of the typos and grammatical errors from it. If the Webmaster of this website were to perform this task, it would look somewhat more professional, which would lead visitors to trust in the quality of the company’s services more.

Jamilin.com:  Flaws and Possible Improvements

If this website were to attract more customers, it would have to undergo several improvements. First of all, the website does not possess even a website name or logo at the top of it. In order make the business more legitimate, the website creator must add a business name or website name on the header. Once the website creator fixes this flaw, future visitors may have view it more as a trustworthy institution worthy of their respect. In addition, website contains a lot of grammatical errors and capitalization errors, which makes look unreliable and like it was thrown together by a charlatan for the purpose of extracting unknowing victims’ money. In addition, it is a bit uncomfortable to look at this website because the webmaster has a penchant for overusing capital letters where they are not needed. The overuse of capital letters in any web website evokes the idea that the webmaster is shouting at visitors, which is not something that most visitors want to be reminded of when they are visiting this website. Honestly, the appearance of this website itself evokes the feeling that it could be easily used to smuggle a virus into visitors’ computers. The website should acquire a secure address (https) in order make the experience of using it more secure for visitors. In addition, the visual appeal of this website has been downgraded by the use of too many fonts, which make it harder to read. This website should be modified to only black font if the website creator wants to use the current website background because black font will be easier to see than the blue and red fonts displayed here. In addition, the light tan background itself appears to be quite bland and has done nothing to add to the aesthetic appeal of this website. In order to enhance this website appeal, the website creator should perhaps consider using a more lively color like light blue or pastel green as the background color. Unfortunately, this website contains a narrow amount of space, which only take up about 1/3 of the space of each web page. The website design could be improved by making it possible to use most of the rest of the blank space available on each page of this website.

NPS Effective Features

The National Park Service website contains several key effective features. The website is obviously aimed at visitors who have interest in visiting these national parks, and this website showcases the features of these national parks through photographs and videos quite well. The website’s design is clear-cut and quite organized. It features interactive maps that you click on to find national parks in all 50 states, in addition to giving visitors the option of searching for them by the names of the states (which indicates to me the web developer really put a lot of effort into creating the website, which makes me more enthusiastic about reading this website and potentially traveling to some of the national parks mentioned on this website).  In addition, this website has a great design layout and sense of organization. For example, visitors do not have to type in a search box if they do not want to, although that option is still available to them if they want to use it. The website also contains effective branding. The  “National Park Service” logo looks professional, brightly colored, and is placed in the same location at the top of every page. The aesthetic quality of the website is also quite attractive, which includes contrasting colors of lots of brightly colored videos and photographs against a clean white background. The visual contrast makes it very easy to see anything written on any of the webpages on this website.

Riverside Art Center: Effective Features

This website contains several effective features. The website displays the art in a way so that if a visitor clicks on the images, this images will increase in size and be easier to view. In addition, the Riverside Art Center website also features interesting colorful, artistic headers that embody the purpose of the website, which is to display art. In terms of aesthetic appeal, the website does a good job of creating a light-hearted, pleasant environment for viewers to navigate. In terms of the design of the website, I found it very easy to navigate to other pages every time that I click on new links. Each web page also possesses a recognizable logo that appears at the top of every page, and the placement of this logo is consistent on every single page of this website that I looked at. The branding of the this website, which is marked at the top of every web page, makes me think this art center is a institution that is popular with the public and one that is possibly well-funded by public and private sponsors.