Good and Bad Website Examples

Good Website Example: http://www.jasonbellphoto.com/#/photographer/Jason%20Bell/Vogue/

Good Design features:

Text: The text is easy to read and is a nice size. The background is white so it doesn’t interfere with the text and creates a nice contrast and clean look. Titles are in all caps, but it’s not obnoxious. Other type, such as his “about” section is paragraphed well and is easy to read.   

Navigation: Navigation is really great and easy to use. Hovering over the photos you can see if you will be going to the previous image or the next image, or you can use the toggles at the bottom of the page. A neat feature is that you can also go to “full screen mode”, which has the same navigation, just fills up your screen.

Links: Any links fall to a deeper contrast so that the viewer knows it’s a link when you hover over it. The links aren’t underlined though, so the viewer is unaware what are links and what aren’t.

Graphics: Graphics are not big and obnoxious, they’re all clean.

           

General Design: Some photos take a long time to load which is extremely unappealing. However, once you get past the first one you can click through a couple before you get to another large file. Layout is nice though, and is pretty typical so it’s easy to work.

Good Website Example: http://www.danielkennedy.com/

Good Design features:

Text: The text in this website is all in the same area and undisturbed by other elements of the website. The background is plain, so it’s easy to read the text. However if I were to do something different, I would have the text contrast from the background more (even though it has a nice contrast when you scroll over it).           

Navigation: The navigation is simple and easy. There are two different options for scrolling through photos; you can use the bottom film roll, or use arrows by hovering over the images. Clicking on new categories takes you to the same basic layout every time so you don’t need to learn a new navigation for different sections. “PDF’s” and “News” take you to a new link, however it doesn’t completely distract the flow of what you’re looking at.

Links: The only link that I found was to his website. It wasn’t clear that it would be a link, but most websites do that and he followed the trend. Also he has another link that says “click here”, so it’s pretty obvious that it’s a link except for that it’s the same color as everything else, so my eyes weren’t directed over there.

Graphics: The navigation buttons are subtle but noticeable, nothing too flashy or obnoxious.

           

General Design: The pictures are big enough to fit most of my screen, but still leave room for easy navigation and they aren’t so large that I have to scroll to see the entire image. Some images take a second to load, but most of them load quickly. The whole site has a mute color scheme that allows you to really focus on the pictures.

Bad Website Example: http://ohdarlingphotography.com/

Bad Design features:

Text: Text isn’t bad; it is decently clean and pops from the background. Sectioning out the different labels with lines is a little unnecessary though.     

Navigation: Navigation is a bit slow, and there’s not a ton to navigate through. Arrows for navigating are big and obnoxious.

Links: Links are underlined in text, which is nice. However the “Facebook” and “Twitter” labels take you straight to and off the website which is a bit annoying since all the other labels navigate you to somewhere within their website. Also, the home page has links at the bottom that look like they should work, but don’t when you try clicking desperately all over them.

Graphics: Graphics for navigating look a little sloppy because they are half the size of the images. Their logo is about 1/3-1/2 of their page; they could downsize these majorly for more room.

           

General Design: General design isn’t appealing. As mentioned before, their logo is the biggest design element when their photos should be the largest item on the site. You have to scroll through most of the site due to their oversized logo. Images are decently slow to download even though they are small images. Going to full screen mode doesn’t enlarge the images, so it’s pretty pointless.