Elements of a website review

Introduction

A brief introduction about the purpose of the website you are going to review is very critical. In the introduction write in brief what the website is about, and give a brief history of the company and what it does. You can also mention in brief your opinion about the website.

Design

Design is the first thing anyone notice when he comes to a website. Analyze the following layout of the content and try to answer the following questions.

• Is it too cluttered? Or is it clutter-free?
• Does the color-scheme of the website good for the niche it operates in?
• Is it appealing?
• Is it easy to find information on the website?
• Is the design SEO-friendly?

Navigation

Navigation plays an important role in the whole website. Try to answer the following question in your review.

• Is the navigation intuitive?
• How many clicks does it require before you can reach the desired page?
• Are all page connected to the home page?
• Is the website using flash, Java-script or any other scripting for the navigation?
• How flat is the navigation? Or is it too-much layered?
• Are there any broken link?
• On which side of the website is the navigation?
• Does the website have an HTML and an XML site map?
• Is the navigation SEO-friendly?

Focus element

Focus element of the website is the core of the website, for which the website has been built. It’s the intent of the website is clear.

• Is the intent of the website clear?
• Does the focus element of the website express the objective?
• How quickly can a visitor tell what the website is about?
• What’s the website trying to accomplish?

Content

Content of a website is its lifeline. The quality of content will determine how long visitors stay on the website? The quality of the website’s content will determine if a visitor will return or not, and whether he will make a purchase or not.

• Is the content relevant to the website? Does it serve the purpose of the website?
• Is it well-written?
• Does it make sense?
• Does it contain grammatical, punctuation, or structural errors?
• Is the content professionally written?
• Is it SEO-friendly?

This is the basics of writing a website review. In case you need to go into more complex details when writing a website review then I will suggest you to wait till the next article comes along. Until then practice writing basic review using the elements suggested above.

Creativity plays an important role in web designing and so does intuition.

What did I say…intuition?

How could intuition possibly be related to web designing?

Role of Intuition

Well, do not get bogged down by thinking that intuition does not matter in the process of designing a website because it does and it does a great deal. Talk of anything creative and you are talking of intuition playing a role in how it comes about. In terms of web designing, intuition play a significant part when:

• We chart out navigation map for the website. How users move from one place cannot be known by any other mean if not intuitively. You cannot explain how you know that the website visitors will go to c from a then come back to b then again to a then d and so on and so forth. An experienced web designer just knows how a visitor is going to interact with the website.
• We chose the color scheme. Indeed color theories are there to assist us on which color will look good with which color and which will look awful. But you cannot explain why a certain type of website works well with certain color scheme, while it fails when other color scheme is chosen. And why one color scheme works well with one type of website and does not work will with another kind of website.
• We decide the placement of elements in the website. There are many elements that are important for our website, but not all the elements will work at all places. Some elements work well when placed at the first position on above-the-fold while other works at eye-level. Can you explain why this subtle difference matter?

Can you help me find where else intuition plays an important role? Use the comment box and help me know more about this.

Years before, Internet Explorer introduced DHTML or Dynamic HTML to allow these kinds of effects to be done from within the browser. However, this was available to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer only. There is a way to implement these effects via Javascript however, you had to know about animation and mathematical and physics equations to create them. However, with the arrival of Script.aculo.us, these effects can now be easily created.

Script.aculo.us is not only for animation though. It also has several functions that allow the programmer to add drag and drop functionality, in place editing, dynamic creation of Document Object Model(DOM) elements on the page, AJAX functionality, playing sounds, and unit testing. That’s quite a mouthful of useful features that could not only make pages you make attractive but also make it functional and easier to program.

Checking out the homepage of Script.aculo.us, we can find links for all the features of the framework. They are categorized into 6 groups. These categories include: Core Effects, Combination Effects, Effect Helpers, Behaviours, Controls, and Miscellaneous.

The functions for the animation effects are found in the Core Effects, Combination Effects, and Effect helpers groups. Some of the effects that can be created include:

• highlight
• morph
• move
• opacity
• scale
• parallel
• queues

Parallel and queues are not really separate effects but are instead a way for the programmer to string together several effects to create the illusion of one continuous effect. Combination effects are a mixture of the core effects that have already been customized in a way so that they appear to be one smooth effect.

As for behaviors, script.aculo.us includes the following functions:

• draggable
• droppable
• sortable
• form element dalayed observer

These functions allow the programmer to create elements on the page that can be dragged and dropped using the mouse, sort values and text, and provide a way to monitor page events and respond to them after a specified time delay.

For AJAX programmers, the controls group of script.aculo.us would be beneficial. These functions include:

• in place editor
• in place editor for collections
• auto-complete
• auto-complete with results from a local array
• slider

The in place editors allows the programmer to allow the user to change values of elements on the page and save them immediately. The auto-complete features on the other hand allows the user to experience a more responsive system while typing information in the form of auto-suggest lists. Finally, the slider feature allows the user to use slider bars to choose from a range of values instead of typing in the values manually.

The miscellaneous group of features are truly varied. The builder feature allows the programmer to insert new elements to the page, while the sound feature provides a way to play and stop music on the page. Finally, the unit testing features allows the programmer to test sections of their program without much difficulty.

So if you’re a web programmer looking for a way to integrate great effects and features to your page without the pain of creating them all from scratch, you may want to give script.aculo.us a test drive today!