Evaluate 2 websites. List the URL's. What criteria did you use for your evaluation? Be specific. Address issues such as naviagtion, visual appeal, purpose, loading time, usefulness of content (or entertainment), interactivity, use of multimedia. What other criteria did you use to evaluate the website?

There are various criteria in which I took in mind while evaluating the two websites such as: one-size surfing, good usage of proximity, text, graphics, links, backgrounds, general design and also all from the given prompt.  However, there were two main criteria that seem to take first and second place before all the rest: purpose and clarity.  To me purpose is one of the most important factors of the design.  What is the website about?   What do I want to say and show?    Only then I am able to evaluate each decision the web designer has taken to achieve his/her goal.   In addition, clarity becomes another important piece of the puzzle.  Is the information given in the website clear and coherent?  There is no worse frustration to a viewer to go into a well-design website and see that all of the content and navigation are unclear and does not make any sense. 

My first website evaluation is from a site called, http://www.jennafavadesign.com/.  The owner of the site is a graphic designer and creator.   Her purpose is to sell products and generate clientele (business).  The information given in this site seems to be legitimate and not a hoax, her contact information is easy to find and the visual appeal is of a professional website that gives the viewer confidence in its content.   There is the usage of one-size surfing criteria.  All of her information is there at first glance fitting the page and, there is no scrolling down, sideways or hidden navigation.  The color scheme is simple but effective; black background with a white frame and pink on some of the fonts.  The labels are left aligned in a good size font, not too large, very easy to read and clear to assume where they will lead.  The content is coherent and easy to follow.  There is consistency and repetition in her design from page to page.  It is understandable why the designer wanted to keep the font for the content a little smaller to keep all on the same page, but I think it would look better if it was a tad bigger.  Once you click on a tabbed link to go to that specific page, the color of the label changes to pink so the viewer knows at all times where they are.  There are content and thumbnails images of her works but unfortunately once you click on the thumbnails to view them in a larger scale they do not come up.  The site also has external links, which once clicked are opened on another page, keeping the website open.  Loading is relatively fast and very easy to move from page to page.   This website is interactive (user friendly) and uses some multimedia, like pictures and some of her graphic designs.  This web designer kept things simple but was able to achieve a high level of sophistication.  The site is not bogged down with meaningless information and tons of pictures.  Everything was organized and very clear where to find the needed information.  The Jenna Fava Design website was beautifully done. 

My second website evaluation is from a site called, http://www.serene-naturist.com/.   The purpose for this site is very confusing and unclear.  The site claims to be a therapy center that sells Swedish massages to clients and also is dedicating the website to their “naturist clients” (not sure what that means) but the main purpose is to create business of some kind.  There is no visual appeal, only busy and hideous appeal.  After a long time searching for the contact information, I realized the website is from Manchester, UK.  There is no inkling giving to the viewers (this is a .com site) that this website is foreign.  On the main page on the right hand side the words, “Index Page” is shown.  It serves no purpose only to add more confusion to the main page.  Also, the website keeps track of the time, the “actual” time.  There is no need for that, if you have a computer you can see the time.  There are various types of typography and font sizes/colors throughout the website, making the task of reading their content much harder.  The content itself is confusing and disorganized.  There are some dubious links on the website, like the one for the “nudistexplorer” (I did not dare to click on it!) with a thumbnail size image of a naked person on a bike at the end of the main page.  This sends off the opposite message that this website claims to have, the professionalism of qualified massage therapists.  On the top of the main page, some of the index label does not have a working link.  The usage of multimedia was too much; flying butterflies, different size of pictures with no coherent message, the strange music for each page, and what is the sculpture without legs, arms and head has to do with Swedish massages?  The loading time is the only thing this site has going for them, it’s fast.  There is no good use of proximity and they used all of the alignments on the same page (every page) making the website disorganized and so hard to read.  There were too many usage of blinking and animations, the butterflies and the “disappearing” message, no one will have time to wait for that message (I did and I still don’t know what was saying!).   Overall, the general design of the serene naturist page was extremely bad.  There was no usage of: the one-size surfing criteria, no focal point to the webpage (too many of them), extremely clutter with unnecessary information, and lack of contrast, good contrast.  However, for me the worst crime of this webpage is the ambiguity of it all.  Is this website a reputable therapeutic business that suffers from bad taste of a web design or is it a website camouflaged as regular business to sell “illegal” services?  What do you think?