The website http://imaginepeace.com/ has a giant banner on its front page which takes up more than half of my screen and depicts a hills with a car parked next to a giant beam of light reaching into the sky, with quotations from John Lennon and Yoko Ono on the left. I do not know what the picture is supposed to represent exactly so the only the quotes are conveying any meaning to me. They describe the site as the ‘biggest online peace event’. This is too vague for me to understand exactly what the website is for. Under ‘what can I do?’ all of the suggestions are just ways to advertise the website.
Below the picture of the hills is a section of the screen devoted to actual content of the website such as advertisements for Yoko Ono’s music and updates on projects she is working on. This section of the screen is smaller than the picture at the top of the screen, which seems rather backwards. Shouldn’t the content of the site get more space than the title? Below this there is a link to the Apple App store so that you can send the website a picture of yourself smiling and your location in the world. In Yoko’s words, this is because “My ultimate goal in film-making is to make a film which includes a smiling face snap of every single human being in the world”. Thanks to the rates at which old people die and babies are born, this goal is obviously impossible, so whatever. The bottom of the screen provides links to Yoko Ono’s Facebook and Twitter.
The background of the site is a picture of the clouds, which is a constant among every page of the site. Everything else is presented in self-contained boxes, which can scroll while the clouds stay still. This leads to a consistant visual style that lets me know this is all part of the same website. The site is relatively simple and easy to navigate, so it gets points for that. Also some pages are programmed to play Lennon and/or Ono music as long as you stay on the site, which is a nice feature I guess.
The site is navigated by a horizontal menu bar with vertical scroll-over lists of content below the picture of the hills (a search bar is also provided for us here too). The manifesto/FAQ tell us that “Together, we are creating a world of Peace, Love and Freedom, all while the negative forces try their hardest to stop us,” And that “The way we are doing it is by being conscious of the ‘Power of Togetherness.’” That’s about as in-depth as the website gets, so frankly I do not know what this site is for. I guess it looks fine visually, but I really do not know how Yoko intends to bring about world peace.
WAR IS OVER is one project that has its own page on this website. It’s just a bunch of posters that say ‘war is over’ in tons of different languages that Yoko encourages us to print out and hang up all over the place. Obviously war isn’t over, so I don’t get it. Finally, the last option on the menu directs us to a page that has information on various charities that you can give to. This is the first thing I’ve seen on the website that actually does any tangible good as far as I can tell, and I had to go to the very end of the menu to reach it. That’s not good placement.