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June 17, 2014 at 2:18 pm · Filed under Monthly Review, Summer 2014 and tagged: "Intro to Web Design", body jewelry, Chelsea Sosinski, freshtrends, jewelry, Review
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.
March 26, 2012 at 12:27 pm · Filed under Bi-Weekly Review, Spring 2012 Section A, Student Work and tagged: "Bread Crumbing", "Brock Switzer", "Web Design", Review
SecondStory.com
Second Story is the website of a design firm located in Portland Oregon. The webpage for this group is amazing. The site uses a combination of traditional scrolling on the “news” page as well as x-axis jquery to continue through the information. The sites navigation is beautifully laid out. The viewer has a couple options. For the first option one can simply click on the links located on the left hand side of the page and watch as the site smooth scrolls to the side to reveal the clicked on section of content. The other option is to press arrow buttons on the right hand side to continue through the content sections. Obviously, this is a brilliant way to guide viewers through the site to view the content in the order desired by the designers. Someone visiting the site must move through each section of information in order to arrive at the next. Everything is on the same page and the order never changes but the site is very easy to use and with the addition of quick links on the left a visitor to the page can get to the information that they need quickly as well, for example the “contact” page.
Morethan20.com
More Than 20 is a website for a husband and wife photography team in Buffalo, NY. This website is also pretty amazing. The site is at it’s core a one page site that uses both jquery and self-scrolling to achieve the final goal of being taken through the content. Again, the use of jquery to scroll for the viewer allows designers to have nearly total control over how the site is viewed and in what order. The site shifts to multiple pages once the “galleries” section is reached. When the viewer clicks on a photo it moves to a separate page full of photos from the session indicated by the thumbnail. Just because this is a separate page doesn’t mean that it is difficult to return to the single page sections. The links at the top remain no matter what page is currently displayed and when clicked on return the visitor to the main sections. The site has a reasonable and logical flow to it. There is an illustrated logo followed by an about section, galleries, FAQs and finally a contact form.
DucttapeandGlitter.com
Duct tape and Glitter is yet another website for a graphic design company. This website is simple and on multiple pages. When a visitor first arrives at the site it is on a simple homepage with links at the top of the page as well as linked photos near the bottom of the page. The navigation is simple and not too cluttered there are only 4 navigation options at this point. There is some bread-crumbing on the site. There is a large arrow pointing to the top nav bar which is in a specific order which leads the viewer to believe that is the order in which they should be viewed. Again a logical order is used in which the work, about, blog and contact information are viewed in that order.
pulpfingers.com
Pulp Fingers is a group that creates apps for smart phones. The website for Pulp Fingers has a beautiful texture. The entire site feels like cut out construction paper. That being said their navigation leaves something to be desired. The site is rather simple and there are few navigation options but they are near the top of the page and somewhat difficult to see. The link that stands out the most is the “blog” link on the right hand side of the page that stays in the same position with the site as it is scrolled. This link is the most important feeling and seems to take away a lot of focus from the main nav. It may be that the designers wanted the site to have an emphasis on the blog but with other important information like what apps the team is working on, it seems an oversite to make those links less important and hardly noticeable.
TrailerParkTruck.com
Trailer Park Truck is a website for a restaurant in California. This site is very simple, easy to use and the navigation and bread-crumbing are spot on. This website like many others that are nicely laid out used smooth scrolling jquery to guide the viewer through the content areas. The site has a simple nav bar at the top that has very limited options. Once the visitor clicks on a link the site scrolls to the section of information and from there traditional scrolling takes over. Logically, most viewers would no doubt click the first link and then simply scroll through the rest of the sections which are intelligently laid out to give out the information needed in a precise order. There is however always the option at the right side of the page for the viewer to return to the top and click on other links from there. Sites like this one that use jquery links and single pages are clearly the most precise bread-crumbing sites. A visitor almost has no options as to the order of the informations presented which gives the designers and company owners the ability to ensure the information presented is done so in a very particular way.