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Welcome to my page! In today's society, it's all about appearances. Even if you're selling a product that is bigger, better, will clean your house and make breakfast, lunch and dinner it's still not going to sell if people aren't drawn to it and it isn't marketed well. Since the Internet has become the biggest marketplace there is, it is used to exhibit many services and goods. To pay for these services and goods people need to be able to easily obtain information about them as well (navigational ease) as well as have a pleasing interface. This is why webpage design is so important. |
Before we can figure out what a good webpage is, let's focus on what I perceive to be a badly designed one. At first I was going to choose SONY's main site, but then I decided to focus on http://www.sonystyle.com because I've had trouble with a laptop or two from SONY and when I wanted to call for technical support it was always torture to get the contact information. Their website is like a labyrinth. It gives of the impression of being high-tech (which is somewhat good because a buy would like to think that the people they are buying a computer from know what they are talking about) but it is also discouraging since not everyone is a computer expert.
When I went to visit it today it had improved a lot over the way it was before even though it's still focused on being "pretty" than actually functional. The top graphic is very loud and takes away from the actual content of the page. When you try to build a computer (a person that didn't know much about their computers wouldn't get this far) it comes up with a second window which takes a long time to load (on a T1 connection) which means that on a 56K modem it would take forever.
Also when I tried to validate it with w3c.org's HTML validator it did not validate even though in the beginning of their source code it referred to being w3c HTML 4.01 Transitional. There are also the use of image maps which might make it difficult with people who are using text-based browsers or people that have disabilities to access.
For my "good" webpage I would choose http://www.worldwidewebdesign.com because I was searching for good websites and I figured that people in the business would be more likely to have better websites right? See, my brain was working! Anyway, it's start page is a picture of the earth with the name of the site. It leads to another page which has links to their Mission, FAQ's and Contact Information. When a link is clicked, it then creates a frame which allows the pages to be seen. It extends to the size of the screen and it is a clean-cut site.
It's not cluttered at all which is probably what I like the most about it. It even has a pretty good text equivalent for text-only browsers and includes alt's for it's images. That's about it... you know how they say, "Sometimes no news is good news"? I didn't have to talk about this "good" page since I believed it didn't have much wrong with it.
I was looking through the book and found a very disgusting picture of a website. This website was http://www.pepsi.com/highroad/lalaland/lalaland.html. It was criticized for being a "nasty resolution-dependent page from Pepsi." (Nielsen 30) Today, unless they happened to decide that this was the best day to change their website completely the page still exists, yet the revolting image is no more. As you can tell about my descriptions of the image... I agree with Nielsen. What was Pepsi on when they put that page up?
Pepsi.com is still up albeit more like a homage to Britney Spears than to advertise a carbonated beverage. It is not as resolution-dependent as the page shown in Nielsen, but when the resolution size is 640x480, the page does need to be resized and Nielsen states that "the main principle for resolution-independent design is to never use a fixed pixel -width for any tables, frames or other design elements." (29) and instead to use percentages. Pepsi.com breaks this cardinal rule by using fixed-pixel width for it's frames as well as for it's table within it's first frame. Which is whole other story.
I realized that when I viewed the source of two different parts of the page they came up differently. This is when I realized... frames. "Frames: Just Say No" is what Nielsen has to say about the subject on page 85. "Navigation doesn't work with frames because the unit of navigation is different form the unit of view" and "the addressing information shown at the top of the browser no longer constitutes a complete specification of the information shown in the window." (Nielsen 86) Also, "many browsers cannot print framed pages appropriately." (Nielsen 87) This mean Pepsi has just committed a mortal sin in Nielsen's opinion. In my opinion Pepsi's not really in that high standing either.
I used lynx (text-based browser) to look at Pepsi's website and lo and behold I could only read "Pepsi World" and when I clicked on the only link, "Pepsi World 2002". Since the page is in frames if a text reader was set to read the site, it would only get the outer part of the screen, not the inside frames which contain the actual content. This does not have a "completely textual alternative that integrates the information". (Nielsen 155) Therefore the visually impaired are at a loss if they want to find out anything about Pepsi.
I found out from the FAQ/Help page that the browser that one needs to view the site is Netscape Navigator 4.0 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher full-release versions of these so that's probably why my text-based viewer didn't work. Besides the frames, that is. The text has ok "scannability" (Nielsen 104) because the text is dispersed in readable chunks of information. There is no clear way to fragment the text as in Nielsen's example on page 105 so I guess Pepsi was doing the best they could.
It does however have a linked style sheet which Nielsen says, "Always use linked style sheets instead of embedded ones." (81) but it does a severe no-no because it's page titles are always the same. (123) Overall, I would have to say that Pepsi.com may look pretty and nice at first glance but when you delve beneath the surface, there are a whole bag of usability and navigational issues that need to be dealt with.
Page Authored by: Damira Pon
