Upon reentering my group’s website for Déjà Shoe, I found that I am still proud of what we had accomplished. The amount of time and effort put into the project shows greatly in each page. Though there is always room for improvement, we were able to meet the main requirements for a successful website. To prove this statement, I will compare it with the information I read in the book called “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design.” These chapters put great empathizes in the importance of navigation, hierarchy, and unity.

Navigating through our website is fairly easy for viewers to achieve. We stuck to the traditional layout, with the use of a header, footer and side navigation bar, so that new users will still be familiar with our site. In addition, we added breadcrumbs on several of the more in-depth pages to prevent them from getting lost. I also feel that the majority of our buttons are obvious that they are clickable because I used a hover tag for them. Besides the easy navigation, the use of hierarchy improves our site as well.

In the first chapter of the book mentioned above, it discussed the importance of the use of emphasis. It suggested that one should create a focal point for the items they want to stand out. To accomplish this, we stressed the importance of our headings and logo by placing them in the top center of our page. We figured that area was the best place to grab the viewers’ attention. Other methods we used to create hierarchy were color contrast and isolation of elements. We were able to incorporate these techniques in every page, which helped with unifying our site together.

When clicking through the Déjà Shoe website, all of our pages have a clean, professional look, without many distractions. The elements on our site are arranged well so there is an asymmetrical balance. The book recognizes the need for viewers to recognize that each page belongs to the website. I feel we have succeeded in doing so because we kept the same look throughout our site. The layout, navigation, hierarchy, and balance all flow well together. The main issue our group realized was that we made a poor decision in our use of color and lack of texture.

We discovered during critique that the blue we chose to use is very similar to the one used for Facebook. Many of our classmates expressed that this issue was distracting and caused them to think of Facebook rather than Déjà Shoe. For future projects, I will make sure I do not repeat this mistake. In addition, we did not really use texture in our website. If we incorporated this approach, our site could be more interesting. However, we would need to find the right balance, as to not take away from the sight as a whole. Overall, I feel our site was creative and nicely organized.