For this monthly review I decided to compare the sites of The Frye Company and Cole Haan. Layout wise, they take a relatively similar approach to getting your attention and then displaying your products. Both start with a landing page that uses large text and images to show off their products and any featured sales or debuts. Once you go into an internal page (whether it is a list of products or a page about the company itself), they switch to a more traditional design on a one column layout. This layout means that everything below the top nav bar comes across as simply and straight forward.

Here’s where one difference arises. While both have relatively clean looking content areas on the pages, The Frye Company has a much more busy top nav than Cole Haan. Both use a series of stacking horizontal bars but Frye has several more and adds another as you drill down into products to narrow yours search. While Haan has one bar of products and one area above that for “utilities”, Frye has a bar of product categories that expands as well as several bars of utilities. Another way Haan handles the eventual increase in navigation elements is by having the tools for narrowing down your search appear to the left of the products, instead of in another top bar. This brings me to the topic of balance.

Overall, both sites do a pretty good job of achieving visual balance. The pages that use large images do so in a tasteful and logical way and the pages full of thumbnails fill out the space nicely without appearing cluddered. I do, however, thing Haan does a slightly better job. It never seems top heavy, as Frye sometimes does.

When it comes to unity I would say Haan gets the nod again. The design on Frye seems to struggle to decide on a consistent alignment. As a result, even though all of the elements have great color and typographic unity, they often don’t quite seem to fit. Haan does a good job of handling this. There are still several types of content visible on the site, each requiring their own way of being represented, but because the content is more clearly separated, there is the same sense of conflict.

As for having Krug’s 5 things to make sure are always on the page, both sites do a good job in their own ways. They generally accomplish this by keeping the top nav section consistent across all pages. It is worth nothing this is done even on less traditional pages (about us, blog) by having the content sections of those pages use unique designs or layouts. On both sites, these sections contain navigation, search, login, and site ID. This use of Krug’s most important elements makes sure the user is never lost or wondering how to get back home.

Overall I like both sites and plan on using them as inspiration for the final project. I would, as I’ve said before, give slight preference to Haan for its cleaner layout and user interface.