Though both sites primarily sell shoes, zappos.com and jimmychoo.com have very different styles and ways of conveying balance, unity, emphasis, and layout.

Both sites obviously cater to very different audiences – while Zappos has more of a commercial feel to it with easy and obvious navigation, Jimmy Choo has more of a contemporary, fashion forward feel to it, with easy to follow but not as obvious navigation. Both sites use the four elements previously stated (balance, unity, emphasis, and layout) to cater to their goal clients and audience.

For example, both sites uses balance and in terms of their color palettes – Zappos uses mainly blues (varying shades) and creams, with the occasional orange to emphasize highlighted features, the search button, and the shopping cart. Jimmy Choo, in the other hand, uses a palette of mainly white and black with some grays and creams mixed in– clean, sophisticated, and modern.

Both sites also have consistent unity from page to page. The navigation bars at the top of each website do not change – as well the “header.” This helps create unity throughout the pages. No matter where I found myself on the page, I always knew exactly what site I was on.

Each site uses emphasis in unique ways. Zappos uses emphasis through color in a very obvious way (words changing colors from blue to orange, words highlighted with various colors within a block, etc.). Jimmy Choo, on the other hand, uses more subtle methods of emphasis – instead of a word changing a completely different color (like on the Zappos site), a word might change from black to light gray or from unbolded to bold. Overall, in this category – Zappos seems to have a more efficient and effective method for ensuring success in navigation.

Both sites are very different in terms of layout. Zappos has a much busier overall layout than Jimmy Choo – which might be due to the fact that Zappos offers many more products than Jimmy Choo (or so it seems). Both sites use a variation of tabs with subheadings and advanced searches. Neither use breadcrumbing – I definitely felt as though Zappos would benefit from adding some sort of breadcrumbing trail. When I was looking at different products, I found myself getting a little bit lost and thought that a breadcrumb trail might help better figure things out. For Jimmy Choo’s navigation, one thing that seemed a little odd was whenever I hovered my mouse over one of the subheadings (Shoes, Handbags, etc.), the tabs within the subheadings that popped up underneath the subheading are a good two or three tabs worth of space from the subheadings themselves. Why so much space between the two categories? I found that to be the only somewhat confusing part of the navigation.