For the second monthly review I decided to look at and analyze the color, texture and navigation of the website festaitalianafrederick.com. It is a one page website that I found on onepagelove.com.
The colors of the website include a yellow-orange, red-orange, baby blue, chocolate brown, and a dull yellow-green. The first color you see is two shades of the yellow-orange in an alternating pattern with a chefs hat and mustache welcoming you to the site. Just as it states in chapter two of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, both orange and yellow are a more informal color, which is the exact feeling I started to get when I first opened the webpage. As you scroll down or select the next section, the background is white with the text in the chocolate brown color. The brightness of the white kind of took me by surprise, but gave the effect that I should focus on what was on the section of the page. Keeping the navigation bar (the chocolate brown with white text), and a white bar with the logo on it at the top, as you scroll down the next section changes to the other colors with the two-shade pattern. I found that keeping the white bar at the top annoying and distracting because my eye continued to focus on that rather than the content underneath it. The use of the other colors were alright, the baby blue and the yellow-green seemed out of place, but using the red-orange with the blue helped to tie the blue in. The green section of the page I just continued to scroll past it because it didn’t seem to match anything else. Overall I like the colors, I just don’t think they conveyed the message that the site wanted to.
When it comes to texture, the use of the pattern in the background is subtle enough, yet noticeable and adds to the webpage. The Only thing I found distracting was that through the color changes the shapes did not match up breaking the sections up even more, halting the flow of the page. On the first section with the plain white background they broke up sections by using dotted lines, which helps make the content stand out, but it still flows with the rest of the page.
The navigation of the site is pretty simple. You can either start to scroll down or to “enter” the site click on the chefs hat and t scrolls for you. Besides just scrolling, as I states earlier there’s a navigation bar to choose what section of the page you want to go to and it just scrolls there for you. The navigation is pretty easy; it didn’t make me think that much, but more than I probably should have.
The overall look of festaitalianafrederick.com is okay; the navigation is easy, just being able to scroll through if you don’t know you can click to navigate. The colors did seem a little out of place and the fact that the pattern isn’t consistent throughout the page, just changing colors was distracting to me. It’s a simple one page website that works but could be fixed to make just that little bit better.