ARTM2210 Intro to Web Design
Just another Intro to… siteArchive for Summer 2014
Final Review
Having finished up with looking over both our personal restaurant site and the first restaurant site I have noticed a couple things.
Both had simple and easy navigation and color palettes. So just based off the eye test they’re both enjoyable. I really enjoyed both navigation bars on the sites. We had similar looks to it with the logo hanging out in the middle with the rest of the navigation bar coming out both side. If I had stumbled onto our restaurant site it would have at least peaked my interest enough to click my way through it. Overall the appeal wouldn’t be as high compared to the last site I reviewed
I liked the textures that we used for the background of our site. It ties into the theme of the actual restaurant which is long wooden tables for a family dinning experience. The paper texture used as the background for the text gave it a nice contrast to the background. The logo I wish I would have polished up a little more and tweaked a couple things, and that would have made the site look more legitimate.
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Final Review
In this day and age a website to a restaurant can make or break the business. If the website looks unprofessional, cheap, or disorganized, the establishment will take on the same feelings in the mind of a future customer. What’s more important, a restaurant website needs to seduce and entice a future customer so much so that they leave their house to spend money there. My partner and I are learning how to do such by applying depth with textures, bright, standout colors and readily available navigation with the website for Six Penn Kitchen as our inspiration.
Our website is similar to Six Penn Kitchen because we used a similar navigation system that centers itself around the logo. We liked that the logo was easy to find and in a place that Stephen Krug describes as a “convention” to standard web anatomy in his book Don’t’ Make Me Think. We are also borrowing their secondary navigation, which is located conveniently under their primary navigation in their menu section.
What we decided to not use from Six Penn was their lack of bright colors and texture. Instead we brought in depth with a wooden floor texture and bright colors that you can associate with the heritages behind our website. We wanted people to connect our website with our restaurant style and design. The wood texture represents our wooden floors and tables. All in all our design is beginning to take a form and its a good one.
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final review
When looking for a site to review that is related to my final project, the food truck site for Soups In The Loop (http://www.soupsintheloop.com/) stood out. Since my final project is also a site for a food truck, I thought it would be good to take a look at a real food truck site and compare it to what Trey and I have created.
Red and yellow is very heavily used on the Soups in the Loop site. Each page is filled with red with yellow and white accents. The colors of the site match the colors of their food truck, which would help unify it for people who are familiar with one or the other. These colors are very commonly found in fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s and Wendy’s, so while it does give off the connotation of food and hunger, it is not very unique. The yellow and white are used as the text on the red background of the site which makes it fairly easy to read the sans-serif text. Although my initial reaction to the color choice is not very positive simply due to preference, reading the Color chapter of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design helped me open my eyes a little bit to see the benefits of the color scheme. The reds and yellows are very warm colors, and as noted from the Color chapter, warm colors represent heat as well as motion. Heat makes sense in this case because it is a soup restaurant and in most cases soup is thought of as being a warm dish. The motion comes into play in the fact that the restaurant is a food truck, therefore moving is a big part of its success. It is also mentioned that warm colors dominate over cool colors and having a site that stands out is a good thing.
In the background of the site, texture comes into play with the company’s darker red logos and various words overlaid on the red. In the main content part of the site, the logo is repeated in different opacities of white to break up the plain red again and give some needed texture. The top of the page near the navigation is also broken up with some nice texture in the form of the yellow outline of the Chicago city skyline. The texture chapter of the aforementioned book brings up the point of using rounded corners to make the site feel more organic rather than geometric and that technique can be found in some places on the Soups in the Loop site. On the home page there are links to other pages outside of the main navigation that are displayed on images inside of their rounded speech bubble logo. The corners of their twitter feed box are also rounded off so they are not too sharp and geometric looking. This rounding is found again on their content containers as well as some images on the various pages. Overall, the color and texture is quite consistent from page to page which helps make it clear to the user that they are on the same site when they enter a new page, but might make it slightly confusing to exactly which page they are on.
As for navigation, this site does a good job at always having the main navigation at the top of the page in a consistent spot. The main navigation is slightly small, but the white, uppercase lettering on the red background still makes it easy to see. More navigation that remains consistent is also at the top of the page and links to their social media sites. I think it is convenient to have those options available to the user, but it does come off a little bit weird that the buttons for the social media are bigger and more noticeable than the website’s main navigation links. Some pages, such as the menu, have a little bit of their own navigation that is only found if you are on the specific page. Upon clicking any of those links you are taken to another page with the only new navigation being a “back to menu” button to take you back to the previous page. A good aspect about the navigation is that you get what you expect to get based on the link name that gets you there. In the Street Signs and Breadcrumbs chapter of Don’t Make Me Think, Krug makes the point that the name of the page should always be the same as the words that were clicked to get to it. When you click on “about” it takes you to a page titled “about.” When you are on the menu page and click the option for “meaty” it takes you to a page entitled “meaty” that lists all of their meaty soups. Another thing they could have added to the main navigation would be some sort of change to the link when you are on that specific page. Krug also talks about how important “you are here” indicators are and says how sometimes designers make them too subtle. While the page name is indicated near the top of each page, having the word “about” switch to yellow from white while you are on the about page would have added a little bit more to make it more obvious.
My final project, while also based on a food truck, is fairly different from Soups in the Loop’s site upon first glance. Our color palette, while still fairly bright in some aspects, will be a lot more toned down from theirs. We have a good bit of white space in ours to appear more clean and crisp and also help our more colorful graphics pop more. We are using brighter colors in our graphics to relate to the cultures that we plan to fuse together, being Moroccan and Creole. I feel that our color choice will be more unique than the typical red and yellow for restaurants and make ours stand out in the minds of our customers. We also want our site to be a little bit more simplified visually so that we can add texture with the background and graphic shapes and not be overwhelming. In a similar fashion to the way Soups in the Loop did it, our site will have a background behind the content box. This will add a little bit of depth and also make the content clear while also having a unique background design. While Soups in the Loop’s container does give it some depth, the colors are still very similar to the background, which is different than what we are aiming at accomplishing. Like them, our navigation will be consistent so it is easy for the user to go through our site without wondering how they got there. We plan to use stronger “you are here” indicators since it makes it easier for non-designer users to know what is going on as well as do what Soups did by keeping the page links and titles the same. We hope to learn from the mistakes of others as well as use some great features and ideas that we saw around the web to help make our site be one that stands out among the rest.
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Review 3
The two restaurants’ sites that I chose to explore were Franktuary and Six Penn Kitchen. I have never been to either of these restaurants and haven’t really heard anything about them before now, so I had to rely entirely on their websites to discover exactly what they were.
The first site I picked to look at was Franktuary’s. My first impression of the site was not a good one at all. The home page lacks any information at all, only displaying a big picture of empty glasses, the name of the site, a generic navigation menu at the top and their most recent tweet. Based on this, I had no idea what this “restaurant” was. In fact, it looked more like a site for a bar because of the background image. Since I was still clueless, I clicked on the “about” link hoping to be enlightened. Again, the background picture made me think it was a bar since it was of bottles of alcohol. The written about section, although it was what I initially wanted to read, after looking at it I lost interest. They seemed to have made the paragraph text bold and the headings regular text which makes it harder to read and puts emphasis in the wrong place. The fact that it is white text on a dark background only added to the difficulty in reading it. After looking through the “press,” “blog,” and “photos” pages I was slightly happier with the site as a whole. Each of those pages had a good sense of unity and balance with the content all being in the same container and being where I expected it to be. It lost some of that unity when I looked through the three location options since each one had a different way the menu was displayed, making me have to question if I clicked on the right link or something was wrong. There really isn’t much to this site or its layout, and I kind of wish there was more, especially on the home page. Even though I cannot say I am a fan of it, it does do a decent job at following Steve Krug’s list of things to be obvious from the end of the Street Signs and Breadcrumbs chapter of Don’t Make Me Think. Each page has the site ID clear at the top of the page in the same spot. Aside from the homepage, they all have the page name displayed at the top of the content box. The primary navigation is always located at the top, although the buttons do not change to display your current location. Like Krug mentions in the aforementioned chapter, the site designer made the “you are here” indicators too subtle in the fact that the only indication is the page name at the top. The local navigation shows up when on the different location pages and has the same issues at the primary navigation. As for the search option, I did not even realize it was there until I really looked for it. It is at the bottom of each page, except the home page, which was a bad choice. It is also very repetitive in that the heading reads, “Search the Site,” the search box reads “search for:,” and the button to search says “search.” They easily could have taken out two of the “searches” by taking out the “search for:” and changing the button to simply have a magnifying glass like Krug mentions is universally recognizable as a search mechanism. Overall, I was very disappointed with Franktuary’s website.
Next I searched the Six Penn Kitchen website. Compared to Franktuary’s, I was very happy with the homepage. They included a good amount of information in a way that didn’t overwhelm the page. They showed the restaurant itself along with a few photos of their food and also did a little bit of bragging. They have a nice, clean navigation bar at the top that stays standard throughout the whole site and some secondary navigation at the bottom with their location and options to contact them. Unlike with Franktuary’s site, the layout of each different page of Six Penn’s is slightly different but still stays unified by keeping the same navigation at the top and bottom as well as using the same colors and fonts. Although they also utilize a mostly white font on a dark background, it is easier to read because of their thinner, sans serif font choice and spacing. Although Franktuary’s site did a decent job with Krug’s list, Six Penn did better. Their site ID was similarly always located at the top of the page, though the page names did not reappear above the content. I did not feel that it was too much of an issue though because unlike the other site, Six Penn’s navigation bar had page names that changed to a bold green when you were on that page. That made their “you are here” indicators more obvious. When on pages like the menu, the local navigation did the same thing, which unified the design further. There was no search option that I could find on this site, but the links were so self-explanatory and the site itself was simple enough that a search option did not seem necessary.
Comparing the two sites, they both had a similar layout and balance with the top navigation being strong and the rest of the content being centered below. But based on the way each handled their design, Six Penn comes off as a much classier and respected restaurant that I would rather go to. They made it easy to navigate their site and find exactly what you are looking for, unlike Franktuary’s which leaves me with more questions than answers.
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Review 3
The website that I chose to review was Six Penn Kitchen.
http://sixpennkitchen.com/index.aspx
To start things off I would just like to comment on the colors used on this site. The grey works so well with the orange and green they used as highlight colors. I like the way the white and green text work with the grey background. Just looking at the homepage everything is clean and spaced out well, and you are able to get a clear sense of what the restaurant is all about. It’s nothing to overly complex when it comes to the designs on the homepage. They just have some photos and a couple bits of information highlighted that they feel are important. I mean it works and I enjoy it. However that’s because I am a fan of simple and clean looking designs and that’s what this site comes off as to me. Navigation wise it is pretty easy to get around the site. They have the bar at the top of the site with the Menu, About Us, Private Events, News & Events, Gallery, and Location. So as soon as you get to the site you would be able to go exactly where you need to go just being on the homepage. I did really enjoy the idea of putting up a gallery. It also the user to see exactly what you have to offer as a company and what the overall atmosphere is there. That also is another feature that allows the user to interact on their site. It covers the interior of the restaurant, the food, some of the past event, and one of their main features to the restaurant which is their rooftop. Another feature I really liked about this site was how they set up their menu. They have a sub menu that lists their brunch, lunch and dinner menus. Being able to cycle through the different menu types was a unique aspect hat I don’t really see to much on other restaurant websites. So overall I think that this website really works well. The color scheme used for it blended well together, and the navigation of the site was simple and easy. Just based off the website alone I would visit the restaurant for a meal. So I guess you could say it did its job.
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Review 3
As a child I remember choosing where we ate dinner was always determined by how much money we had, if we got a coupon in the mail or if the place was highly recommended by a friend. We were less likely to try something new unless we had reassurance that it was kid friendly and didn’t cost “an arm n’ a leg”. In other words, we typically stuck with a few favorites and never branched away from them. Now, thanks to the computer age, trying new restaurants is my specialty. In fact, my decision is solely based on good reviews from Yelp! and the restaurant’s website. Restaurant websites can be dealmakers or breakers. Consciously the user is looking for prices, a menu and for directions or hours. Unconsciously, the user is looking for style, atmosphere and organization. A poorly made website for a restaurant push me away without missing any of my requirements. To exemplify this, I decided to compare and contrast the websites of two local restaurants, Bravo Franco Ristorante and Six Penn Kitchen.
I began with Bravo Franco Ristorante, a little Italian restaurant located on Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The homepage was given a scrapbook look and there were large photographs of Italian dishes. The design elements gave a warm, up-scale family vibe. The primary navigation led me to the pages they had described and it was easy to navigate, but they broke a few web design rules. They used too much “happy talk”. Happy talk, as described by Stephen Krug in Don’t Make Me Think, is wordy self-congratulatory talk that basically fills space. The problem with this is that it’s all talk and no show. If Bravo Franco Ristorante really was the best, they could show it in photographs to prove it not fancy words. Secondly, there was no evidence as to my location on the website. As Steve Krug states in his book, navigation should be so obvious that it’s obnoxious. I found that there was no indication as to which tab I was apart of.
Six Penn Kitchen, also located on Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was the restaurant that earned my patronage. Just based on the site alone, I found Six Penn seemed sophisticated and modern. They did not use a lot of “happy talk” and showed a ton of images. In fact, they had an entire gallery with pictures of food, staff, events and venue. What I enjoyed most about the site was their use of current content. Krug states that using current, or live content can keep a relatively stationary site. All in all a good restaurant should have a good website.
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Trey_Review 2
For my review, I want to cover the http://lostworldsfairs.com/atlantis/ website. Immediately I found this website very entertaining mostly because of the “magic trick” they did with the code. Overall I feel like the color scheme and texture used in the layers of water was very successful, as it reminds me of an vintage comic book. The textures in the colors look almost spray painted making it very original in my opinion. If I were to feel it on my hands, I imagine that it would feel like construction paper. And if the designer was “going for that” I think they did very well and accomplished it. The text really adds to the experience making it seem like a real attraction of some sort, a tangible section of the world. I would describe it as a retro Las Vegas casino.
The navigation in this site is very simplistic. Just scroll up… and down… but I would like to commend the designer on his/her decision to use the colors of the water to break up the sites into sections. If that were not there I feel as if the site would be lacking depth in it’s construction and it would really hinder it’s aesthetics. Another piece that adds to the navigation experience is the marker on the side that lets you know where you are on the page and the occasional headliner ads through the scrolling. These elements make you rally feel as if you are getting deeper and deeper inside of this ocean and are getting close to the sea floor. The icing on the cake is the character in the middle. Even though he is not moving. The holes in the elevator are enforcing the motion that is being implied and it works great. I really thought the guy was in a elevator somehow for a few moments.
In my opinion the site is created very well because it is very cohesive in it’s design. All the factors at play really catch the viewers attention and the ease of use make It a very interesting website. This isn’t a website that is going to direct you somewhere else. It is very artistic in it’s nature and as much as I like that, I would say I wish there was more. If there were fade in’s of animations or fish swimming
about, “mermaids…. mermaids would be cool as hell”, I think that it would really put it over the top and I would probably visit the website multiple times to see if I can find anything I missed and show my friends this as well.
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Review 2
One of my favorite one-page sites that I came across while searching through onepagelove.com is called Portuguese Chimneys, found at http://www.chimneys.pedrogaspar.net/#1. The site is fairly minimalistic and is more of a display of the architectural designs of different chimneys found and recreated by Pedro Gaspar.
I was drawn to the site by its simplistic, yet powerful use of color. There is a heavy use of variations of blue for the background of each different section. As mentioned in the color chapter of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, blue is strongly associated with the sky as well as water, so having it as the background of pictures of chimneys makes a lot of sense. The chapter also makes note of the calming feeling blue can exude, and scrolling through this site is admittedly fairly calming to me. Although each section has a different tone of blue, the fact that they are each still related by their color similarity makes the design even more cohesive. While most of the site is prominently blue, the chimneys themselves are mostly white with some other small portions of color to accent them. The whites and off-whites of the chimney illustrations make them look clean and are representative of actual chimneys from Portugal. The text on the site is also white which looks quite good on the blue background. The color chapter mentions using white in this way to shake things up, opposed to having colored or dark text on white backgrounds. The other colors used in the illustrations range from yellow to beige to brown to bright red. These add to the design by distinguishing the differences between each chimney even more than shape simply does.
As for texture, the design of this site is quite smooth in appearance. Everything is filled in solid colors that work, although it lacks a bit of depth. Depth is added with shadows on the chimneys, which does make up for it a bit. The texture chapter of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design does make a point by saying:
Now that I’ve spent the entire chapter explaining texture and convincing you to add it to your designs, I feel obligated to let you know that sometimes texture is just unnecessary. Just as you might eliminate color from a design to create a specific effect, discarding texture may just be the best way to establish your site’s personality and character. (texture, 111)
Adding texture to this design might take away from the illustrations if it is done too heavily, but adding a minimal amount to parts of the chimneys might make them look a little more real. The shapes used to create the chimneys are mostly geometric, but some of the details on them are more organic which gives them some character.
The navigation of this site is from top to bottom. I like the option of scrolling a bit to take you to each section or clicking on the circles on the right hand side to pick which section you want from anywhere. It was also a nice touch to have it automatically take you back to the first one if you scroll down while on the last section. It is very easy and simple to navigate through. Having it be so simple really compliments the design since it is also very simple. Though there is not much to read, the font choice is a clean one and it is very legible. The kerning could be altered a little to make it more visually pleasing. Overall I like the way this site was made and hope the designer updates it to add more of his unique illustrations.
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Review 2: The Hipster Alphabet – A One-page Design
One new trend in website organization is the one-page design. The website One Page Love describes this trend as designs that, “aim to provide the user with enough information in a single page to make a decision and act upon it.” As with any other web layout, there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to use this style. An example of the “wrong way” can be exemplified through Michael Mahaffey’s site, The Hipster Alphabet. Albeit an extremely amusing, innovative and visually appealing site, it defies some of the basic layout principles for all website styles.
The first problem I noticed with The Hipster Alphabet is its failure to follow any sort of conventional visual hierarchy. The order of importance as I scan the page begins with the illustrations, secondly the word that each illustration depicts, next the letter of the alphabet and lastly the description. What the user needs to see is the letter, the word, the picture and lastly, the description. What makes my eyes go to the wrong items has to do with a rule Steven Krug defines in his book, Don’t Make me Think; “The more important something is the prominent it is”. The most prominent thing on the page is the illustrations. This is a problem because I have no idea what the purpose of this image is without the prior knowledge of what letter and word the picture is describing.
The second problem is a disorganization of the website anatomy, specifically the title and logo. A typical website will order the title and logo at the top of the page, then the navigation, the content and lastly the footer. Instead, Michael Mahaffey placed the title and logo at the very bottom of the page. At the very least, a title should allows appear above the “fold”. The fold, as described by Jason Beiard in his book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, is where the content of the page ends before the user needs to use the scroll bar. The title below the fold makes me ask myself, “Am I on the hipster alphabet? Or am I somewhere else?” A user should always know on what site they have landed. While the title was the only item out of conventional order, it had unintentionally made the navigation bar confusing. I was unsure whether it was a border or a device for locating information on the page.
Despite the site’s issues, the choice of texture and color was spot on. All of the images on the page followed a distinct style that offered variety while still appearing to connect into one seamless design. The color scheme included multiple pure, vibrant hues, which harsh tones were evened out with the use of a few saturated browns and greys. While there was a limited color palette, texture was subtly applied with these hues to create a more dynamic and visually appealing array of graphics. Most importantly, the texture was never over-used; only simply added to create a more depth to the design.
Take Michael Maheffey’s The Hipster Alphabet as a learning tool for one page design. One-page designs need to follow the same basic layout conventions as any other site. They need to include a simple organization of visual hierarchy and element set-up. They also need to follow a strict color scheme and stylistic elements to enhance the one-page design’s unique flow of information. Most importantly, one-page designs need to have easy to understand and usable scroll and navigation devices. Lastly, remember: you need to provide a user with enough information on a single page to inform its target audience.
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Review 2
After burning through page after page on the site onepagelove.com I have found out that I am rather fond of a well done one page site. One example of this would be http://www.seattlecidercompany.com, aesthetically it is nice to look at and it’s easy to navigate. The nice part about this site is that you can either scroll your whole way through and enjoy some of the animation they have going on, or you can click the links that will jump you down to the lower sections. On top of all of that the color scheme they chose to work with really helps fuel the page. With going with a lot of white space the colors they do use tend to pop off the page, or really accent important information they are putting forward. They also have a couple scroll over features that I didn’t see on other pages. An example of this is whenever you scroll of the photos of the founders it brings up a brief bio about them. I enjoyed that rather than having to click it and it take me off to another page. It helps the flow of the page keeping it like that. So in conclusion I would have to say that this site does a lot of things right. So moving forward if I were to put together a one page site I would certainly look to this page as an example of what works and what doesn’t.
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Review 1: Freshtrends
Thanks to the wonderful worldwide web, shopping for specialty items such as body jewelry has become a much simpler task. Before the appearance of ecommerce stores, (such as amazon or eBay) searching for a unique good meant driving around town, often to many different stores only to maybe find the item you desired. Now the search can be in your home while wearing pajamas and your item is only a few keystrokes, a simple click and $7.95 worth of shipping away.
While piercings are becoming increasingly popular, it’s still difficult to find quality jewelry at a reasonable price without going to a tattoo parlor. Thus, I did some “googling” and came across the website, freshtrends.com. Fresh Trends is a website that sells all types of body jewelry for both men and women. I was interested in finding some new dangling belly jewelry and clear retainers for my nose piercing.
Upon arriving on the site, the first glance was clean and pristine. The logo and site name was on top and the navigation bar was underneath. There were highly colorful ads and all of which looked clickable. But with a second glance, I could see the site was going to have its frustrations. The navigation bar listed each type of piercing for which they catered in addition to two puzzling tabs one labeled “gold” and the other “jewelry”. Wait, what? I thought I already was looking at jewelry? And gold? Couldn’t all the piercings come in gold? It seems like a subcategory. I hovered over the “jewelry” label. It consisted of a spew of random links. I assume a very lazy designer probably just couldn’t fit into any of the other categories. Had this “jewelry” button been before “belly rings”, I may have clicked on it out of confusion. I came across similar circumstances throughout my shopping experience. For instance, I really love UV belly jewelry, but they didn’t have an option for it so I decided on “basic” belly button rings. This ended up giving me a lot of randomly place studs. I ended up settling with a site search.
A second mistake I noted was the overwhelming amount of labels and links offered once I left the home page. The sheer amount was dizzying. Just underneath the “Themes” category there are 40 different links, many of which only led to one or two different items. A worse crime was that many of these links were categorized incorrectly. For instance, the category “style” had the underlying labels of “basic belly rings”, “logos”, “belly chains”, “add-a-charm”, “eternity” and so on. “Style” is such a broad term I feel it could stand for anything. Plus, they already have a category labeled, “Type” which to me means almost the same.
So why do these little mistakes make a difference? Think of it this way; a shopper at supermarket is looking for a particular brand of cat food. Their goal is to go directly to the correct aisle, pick it up, throw it in their shopping basket and proceed to the checkout. They don’t want to go down every single aisle in the store or have to ask somebody. If they do, they become frustrated. They may even feel stupid, because they can’t find something as simple as cat food. You can now almost guarantee, this consumer will think twice before coming back for cat food. Just like in a supermarket, people do not want to have to search the site or wander around aimlessly to find what they want. In conclusion, the site isn’t a gem, but neither are any of the other body jewelry sites. People are going to either have to muddle through the site or travel to a tattoo shop.
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Review 1
Whenever I use the Internet, ending up on online shopping sites is one thing I can rarely avoid. Although I almost never end up making a purchase, I can’t help but be constantly searching various clothing and jewelry websites. At any given time my laptop will have at least five tabs open with different sites pulled up with items perpetually waiting in my cart. (Right now I have three different windows with seventeen different tabs, featuring all different fashion sites.)
The site I chose to look at for this review is one I frequent often called baublebar.com. Bauble Bar is a jewelry website that I happened upon by accident. The site stood out to me from the start because of its clean, chic design. The site itself uses minimal colors for its background and wording as to not distract from their usually colorful products. Aside from the black bar at the top with white lettering, the background is white and the letting is black. They add some color in the bright turquoise, greenish yellow, and fuchsia details such as the many links that only show the colors when you hover your mouse over them. Their typefaces are clean and modern and make the whole site appear very professional and classy. Aside from the site’s appearance that I was obviously taken by, I hadn’t thought too much about the way it was designed in the way I do now after reading the first part of “Don’t Make Me Think.”
To test if Bauble Bar required me to think while shopping, I pulled up the site and decided to look for a statement necklace to pretend to purchase. As soon as the site loaded, I instantly could see the menu bar featuring the list of different types of jewelry. I hovered my mouse over the ‘necklaces’ tab and a large drop down box popped up featuring the names of different types of necklaces along with photos of two seemingly random ones. I easily found the statement necklace option that turned fuchsia when I hovered over it and alerted me that it was obviously a link. Once I clicked on it, their large selection of statement necklaces appeared. Most were pictures of the necklaces on the plain white background that switched to a photo of the same necklace being worn by a model when I hovered over them. I liked that feature because I didn’t have to actually click on each necklace and go to a new page just to see what they would look like on someone. I decided to pick a pretty necklace that was on sale and clicked on the picture to take me to the product page. Once there, it was very easy to find the ‘add to bag’ button along with color and quantity options. They also had expanding information on the description, size and materials, and delivery and returns. Once I picked my color and pressed ‘add to bag,’ a drop down menu showing what was in my cart appeared in the top right corner of the page stemming from the ‘shopping bag’ link in the top black menu bar. It only stayed for a couple seconds before disappearing though, which was slightly confusing since I only wanted the one item. I can imagine it being a good aspect if I had been wanting to just continue shopping without having to press the back button a bunch of times like on many other sites I frequent though. To proceed with the order, I clicked on the ‘shopping bag’ link and this time it took me to a new page with the checkout ability. I stopped there before I could spend $20.
Overall, I found the shopping experience on baublebar.com fairly simple. The design made it quick and easy to find what I was looking for. Nothing was too crowded and I didn’t really have to think very much at all. A good design like that makes it fun to fill up my cart with stylish items I really can’t afford to be buying.
-Emily Brosko
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