Blog Week 4 Post 1

Rover 6 Parts 

1  Navigation - Very poor readability on nav due to all nav items being low resolution and having a pictures as their backgrounds. Way too many items on nav, you have to scroll to see them all. Nav is on the left side of the page instead of the top, where it should be. Nav, is not lined up properly. 

2  Images - Way too many images, all placed poorly. All the images are very small and are poor resolution.

3 Text & Color - Way too many fonts and font colors used. Many instances of text over images, even text over text. Hard to tell what is a link and what is not.

What could be improved - The site is cluttered, it needs to be cleaned up. The site gives the impression of being a very cheap company that I believe many would think twice about doing business with. If it used one or two fonts, a nice color palette, high resolution images, and an improved UI, the site would give a much more professional vibe and this would help their business. 

Gates N Fences

1  Hierarchy - Hard to tell what the name of the business is.  Hard for user to know where to look, or what is of importance.

2  Readability - Way too much text and too small of text. Paragraph text is too bold and has no padding making it so the text is right on the edge of its grey background. It would be better if the paragraphs shared a background instead of them each having their own. "Welcome to" in header appears crossed out, due to background image.

3  Alignment - Paragraphs and image are nearly aligned, but not. Text in header not aligned at all. 

What could be improved - Like Rover6, this site has room for improvement across the board. It could use a better UI, less text, use of hierarchy, grids for images, improved color palette, and an overall decluttering.

Apple 

What they've done right - Apple has a really beautiful looking site, that functions great. I strongly believe that they are at or near the pinnacle of web development and design. Their use of color, text, fonts, font weight and images are all impeccably done. They use really nice animations for their nav in phone view as well as scrolling animations which give a lot of life to their site. 

My reaction - The site gives the impression that Apple is a very high quality company that knows what they are doing and produces cutting-edge/top of the line technology. 

National Park Service

What they've done right - Nicely made site. The images in the grid, with headings and short descriptions underneath look very clean and have good use of font weight, size, and color to establish hierarchy. I also like how the 4 images near the bottom brake out of the alignment and go towards the edge of the screen, the zoom on hover is a nice touch. The footer is nicely done as well. Only slight negative I noticed is that "National Park Service" in the header, and "National Parks in your neighborhood" aren't lined up with the rest of the content.

My reaction -The design of the site gives me a good reaction, everything is nicely done and the site is easy to look at.