Welcome to Evan's blog.

What I am blogging is about to showcase and giving example of a Good and a Poor designed website.

I will write out my point of view regarding both the websites.
Screenshot as evidence to show my point.
Of cause, pls kindly give some comments after reading. It will greatly be appreaciated. ^^V


THE WEBSITE ARE:

http://www.drakescakesonline.com/ (Poorly designed)

and

http://www.dell.ca/ (Well designed)

Bad Website~!!

It's a sad but true fact that there are a lot of very poorly designed websites on the Internet today. This website is definitely not the worst out there, but it is quite poorly designed

Here are some key factors that make Drakecakes a poor website:




1) Homepage

This is the Homepage of the website. It has a very bad contrast. As we can see, the background is so bright and sharp that it may scare the user and browser away. After a long staring and looking at this page, the user eyes will feel very tiring and pain. It is bad for the eyes of users.




2)Colours

There is no consistent colour palette to this site. Colours are thrown together as the designer saw fit. Poor contrast makes the text somewhat difficult to view as well. The background is very uncomfortable and sharp which make the reader eyes feel pain.




3)Poor imagery and Pointless Visual Image

The images on this site are too many, this is distracting and doesn't effectively communicate to the visitor. These make the website v.dull. The images are not properly arranged. This caused the page look in a mess which is very uncomfortable. This site features a large number of GIF images, which are distracting, poorly designed in terms of colour and fonts, and add an unnecessary overhead to the page in terms of file size. It causes the site to have a long loading time. This page has alot of diffrent sizes, type and colour of font. It looks so fancy yet in a mess. The inconsistency of font is a bad choice for the reader. It has a bright blue background with red, white, blue, and black text. This web page overuses contrast, except for the blue text (that you can find if you look really hard) randomly thrown in with text.


4)Poor navigation
Navigation is done through a mass of centre-aligned hover buttons and there is no apparent grouping to the pages within the site. When people visit a website, they are looking for specific information about your company's products or services. If your website is not designed with a good navigation system, then they will likely seek a competitor that does. It is essential that you provide them with the easiest means of finding the information they are looking for the moment they visit your site. The contains, products and services etc are in a junk and all "threw" into the page.




5)Poor choice of technology

From the HTML code, we can see that this site is not using Cascading Style Sheets ( CSS ) to control the layout of the website and also links. Without using CSS, this site takes a longer time to load the page. It also hard to keep the consistency throughout the whole website. Beside that, there is also no use of Flash where only plain HTML would do.




6)Long pages

The pages within this site scroll from 10 to 15 lengths. Content beyond the first 3 to 4 page lengths is typically ignored. The page is too long that the users may feel annoyed. They should seperate the long page into short and sweet multiple pages so that it will be more convinient and looks better for the users.



7) Conclusion
*In conclusion, this website is very poor designed. The designer did not spare a thought for the user. The background is too bright which is harmful to our eyes. Staring and looking for a long time may cause our eyes to feel very pain and tiring. The webpage is so long that it contains more than 4 pages of stuff. This site has too many unnecessary image and no flash is used to make the page more excited and fresh. CSS also not used to control the layout of the site and no consistency between pages.

Good Website~!

Dell.ca is one of the most popular online retailers of PCs and PC equipment. Its websites does tremendous business, and has experienced a lot of growth over the past few years. It has an averange rating of 4.6 out of 5 with a 595 review.

Here are some key factors that make Dell.ca a great website:




1) HomePage

Firstly, this is the Home page of Dell.ca. It has a good contrast on the main page which make it look fresh. It attract the user to continue browse this website for search for information of product and etc. Moreover, it has a simple flash in the main page which make it quite interesting. Since it is a simple flash that show the latest or hotsale product, it took a short loading time.
The picture in the middle, green little plant, make the site look lifely. It let the browser feel fresh and clear.




2) Key Audience

Dell understands that there are three key groups of visitors that frequent their website: home-based consumers, business consumers, and people in need of help. The design lends itself to servicing these three key audiences right from the home page.




3) Consistency

Secondly, this website has a good "Consistency". The look and feel of the site is consistent throughout. As you can see, regardless of which page you are on, you know you are still on Dell.ca. The colours, fonts, and alignments are all consistently displayed. It is helpful for users to keep track on themselves for staying in the same site, not suspecting that they went across to other sites.




4) User-friendly functions

Its navigation and user-friendly functions allow readers to surf the website with ease. There is a shopping cart that lets you retain your dream PC is an excellent tool, and adds a tremendous amount of value to customers. The interactive PC builder section also steps through the customization process very painlessly and reliably. Also, they provided you with the information of purchases help. Dell.ca also does 'search' very nicely. The results are intelligent and grouped by interest (e.g. products, support, articles, etc.)




5) Grouping Sections


As we can see, their GroupingSections are grouped very well, both logically and visually, making navigating this huge site far easier. It allowed the users to have a quick scan of what can be found in this website.




6) Languages and Country Selection

Dell.ca, which is a Canada website, provides user with 2 languages for both English and French. The web designer is thoughtful for those who do not know Frech. It is great to include English as it is world wide used. It also allows users to choose a specific country link of Dell. For example, Canada, USA, Malaysia, Singapore etc.




7) Visual images

The images used on Dell.ca are not overdone; they are simply useful in the sense of giving the consumer a visual of the product(s) they are looking at. It is very convinient for the users. They are able to take a look at the product(s) in Dell without stepping out of house.




8) Font
Beside that, this website allowed users to enlarge and resize the font for the entire webpage. Therefore it will be much better and easier for an elderly to browse through this site. Designer of Dell.ca is so thoughtful they actually spare a thought for elderlys and eyesight. problem users.











9) HTML Code





Lastly, this website used Cascading Style Sheets ( CSS ) to control the layout of the website and also links. This uses of CSS instead of the once popular nested tables not only allows shorter time for the browser to render, but also very useful in maintaining visual consistency. JavaScripts are also used to




10) Conclusion
*In Conclusion, Dell.ca is a great website which have a good contrast. Having some image of fresh and clear feeling make the site appealing. Also, neat little features where you can increase or decrease text size, rearrange grids, price summaries flow with the page.