Eric Saar’s Blog

In Class Working

Learn Good Web Design Habits with my Blog

On my blog you’ll get
•    My background and expertise
•    Learn about web design
•    Bad websites and where they went wrong
•    Critiques of good websites.

Learn new techniques weekly for creating stronger and more powerful websites. Making a great website is harder than most people think. Come to my blog and you will learn from other websites mistakes. I will use my knowledge from the program I’m enrolled in a BCIT to help readers strengthen their website. Once you finish reading the blog posts you will learn about bad websites and where they fail. Learn from others mistakes so you won’t make them.

The Audience of the Web
The core rules of netiquette are good guidelines to follow when writing for the web. The rules help to remind the writer to remember the audience that they are writing for. It is easy to forget that your audience is made up of people. Even though you cannot see them its not a computer that is reading your work it is people. Making the first rule in netiquette, remember the human, the most important. It is key to remember that people have feelings that need to be taken into account when writing.

Treat Others as you Would Like to be Treated
Some topics will evoke emotions that can be very sensitive to the audience.  So when writing you should treat your audience like you would like to be treated. Its simple if you curse, rant or blog with a vengeance it makes you the writer, look uneducated and misinformed. My mother always said that people swear when because they aren’t smart enough to think of something better to say. Everything you write and put out on the web is a reflection of you.

Objectivity
Which is why Rule 7, try to be objective, is another one of the most important rules.  You lose credibility if you can remove yourself from the situation and look at it from all angles. Like in any sport if all you bring is the offence and have no defense then you team is destined to lose. You need to take a position on a topic but if your perspective is so narrow that you cannot see how others might interpret the information you make your position weaker without even knowing it. Defending a topic with emotion isn’t nearly as effective as defending it with facts. Which is also why you need to be considerate of other peoples mistakes. When some one makes a spelling error there is no need to jump all over them you it goes back to rule two treat others as you would like to be treated.

Both websites Mt. Seymour and Mt. Cypress are good-looking sites. Mt. Cypress does a great job of using media and social networking to keep users interested. It has Facebook applications, 360 views of the mountain.

Redundant, Outdated, and Trivial Content (ROT)
With all this great content the websites does start to suffer from ROT. One page in particular on Cypresses is an Artist of the Month page. It has no bearing on the mountain what so ever.  It is dated and needs to be removed. The Second example of ROT is the Gift Certificates navigation buttons on Cypress’ page. The buttons appear in three different location on the home page and all take you to the same website. Just have one navigation button for Gift Certificates.

Wasted Space
Navigation could have been spaced out way better. The Bike Park drop down menu only has two items Bike Park Info and Gift Certificates.  The gift certificate button should be dropped completely and then just turn Bike Park into a sub-category not a main navigation button.

Overflow from Bad Labels
Poor labeling in the navigation and bad site structure resulted in most of the subcategories being put into 2-3 Categories causing them to overflow with data in a sense. For example the Seymour drop down menu for lessons is too long and gets cropped off at the end. So the page Mountain Riders Teen that is supposed to be part of the navigation in missing. If this drop down menu had been shorter then this would have never happened. Yes it is a combination of poor visual design. But had the site been better organized the visual would have fixed itself.  Then there wouldn’t be any missing information.

Photo Galleries
When comparing the photo galleries side by side Cypress was the clear winner. Seymour’s photo gallery looks good but isn’t functional. When you click on a picture the image moves all over the place and sometime you just get linked to another page, this photo gallery is a complete fail. Especially when you look at Cypresses’ clean easy to navigate photo gallery.

Bad Navigation
Both websites do need to fix their second level navigation. There are just too many options.  Even the person who created the Cypress web page was dizzied by all the options.  You can tell because as you click through the navigation and travel to other pages the navigation will suddenly change. Order of navigation buttons changes or some appear/disappear depending on whether or not you’re on the Cypress homepage.

The Winner
If this were a fight Cypress would have taken home the belt. It is a superior page. However both sites need to work on their navigations organization.