Good Looking Websites bad Navigation
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Redundant, Outdated, and Trivial Content (ROT)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.
