Review Websites and Learn Web Design
Reviewing websites can improve your web design skills and help you to create more effective websites yourself. If you know nothing about web design, check out How To Create A Website before you start reading. There are certain things to look for in reviewing a web site and they are summarised below:
Attention Grabber
Effective websites often have something that can grab the audience attention immediately. This can be about the function of the website, a bit about the history or what first attracted / repulsed you when you saw it. Effective websites often score points in this area.
Branding
If you know what a logo is, then you have probably seen branding millions of times. Most websites are lacking in brand. Branding is a way of designing that means you can tell which company / organisation it is just by looking briefly at the item. It helps to think of corporate branding where you can recognise McDonalds just by seeing the certain golden M. Over time, customers come to recognise an organisations logo and colours. A website may have a logo, matching corporate colours and even a matching font. If a logo and the other website colours clash, they are not branded and will NOT help people to identify with the company. Successful websites have the logo and website matching in a skilfull and attractive manner (such as an orange and navy blue logo having a white and navy blue background).
Navigation or Loading Time
Navigation is another important factor in reviewing a website. Is the website easy or hard to navigate? You can discover this when you first look at the website and see if it is easy to find the buttons that allow you to move from page to page.
Are the menus or lists easy to read and find? Does the website load up quickly or not? Slow websites annoy readers and can be the result of big images that have not been optimised properly for the internet. Slow loading can also be due to Flash or large bits of code that have not been simplified.
Design
Does the website look like another website you have seen, or does it have its own personal flavour? Unique design should again score alot of points in website reviews because they are hard to find nowsadays.
Good websites have a unique appearance that does not use a lot of advertising. The excellent websites are the ones you remember with fondness. This is an important point to take note when reviewing a website. If you want to compare websites with unique design, check out unique web design.
Coding
Simple and neat HTML or javascript helps when you are debugging web pages. They also help in seo to a certain extend. This factor is often left out in website reviews because they are not really that important. Unless the webpage is using alot of nested tables, it is usually not a big issue.
Language
Again, this is not really important but too much mis-spelling, wrong usage of grammer or vocabulary gives people a poor impression of your website.
Final Reviews
If you are a website reviewer, do you think the website is successful / unsuccessful and why?
Do you think the website is targeted to the right audience?
Would you recommend someone else to review the website?
Would you revisit the website?
What rating would you give the website?
If you can answer these questions promptly and confidently, you can be a great website reviewer. Finally, if you are a designer or artistic person, check out Sitecritic.net Reviews of Website for more website reviews. There are also many art resource in the site.