Week of 2/2/2009 Blog Post
Question: Share the best website URL you can that models what you think a good homepage like the one you want to build looks like. Why does it do what you want your's to do? Please include information from the reading you've been doing as well.
I am struggling with example URLs for my homepage as I have struggled with the topic for my homepage and actually physically creating it. I have been imagining what content that I wanted on my homepage and how I want it to work without thinking about the best examples of homepages that I can find, but I will try to point out some pages that I think are well designed and some that are less well designed.
I personally like the Hungry Girl page. The colors are too bright for my personal taste, but I like the content and the movement. The scrolling ticker is a nice touch, and, if I can think of the type of content that would lend itself to such movement, might be something that I would try to incorporate into my personal page.
I prefer the color scheme on the Weight Watchers homepage. The more muted colors appeal to my tastes.
Jonny Bowden’s website incorporates a blogger.com blog and a video at the bottom. I like both of these touches. I also like the navigation bar at the top where the user can click through to the different sections of the page including the blog. I also like the continuity between the blog page and the rest of the page.
The Rapid Weaver program that I am using had a blog page template, but I scrapped that idea for my homepage because of the difficulty in dealing with comments. I am currently modifying the HTML on the two blogger.com blogs that we created to attempt to get that seamless appearance. I am still learning HTML so it took me several hours to get them as far as I have. Because my husband was demanding his turn at the computer and because of the eye strain, I stopped with it partially done.
In my opinion, the Make Goal website is a weak example of a website in the area in which I wish to create my homepage. It is one main page with external links to external webpages. Although it has a video section and a calculator, which are nice features, it appears to be disorganized.
I am still looking for artist pages that are good examples of artists’ pages, although I did find a page dedicated to templates for artists to use to build websites to showcase and sell their art.
The reading this week discussed the linearity of text and the passage of time in art and text. Meadows makes the point that even though text is linear, authors use devices like foreshadowing to make the text appear non-linear, while artists use breaks between panels to show a passage of time in comic strips and similar media. In website design, a webpage may have chunks of very linear text with imbedded links, much like I did in the blog above. The reader may choose to follow the link and jump to another page or topic away from the original text, yet when they jump back to the original text, it should still be there, unchanged, as though no time has passed. Does this make the webpage text more linear or less linear than the text in a book? Or is text, just text and always the same regardless of where it is displayed?
I am struggling with example URLs for my homepage as I have struggled with the topic for my homepage and actually physically creating it. I have been imagining what content that I wanted on my homepage and how I want it to work without thinking about the best examples of homepages that I can find, but I will try to point out some pages that I think are well designed and some that are less well designed.
I personally like the Hungry Girl page. The colors are too bright for my personal taste, but I like the content and the movement. The scrolling ticker is a nice touch, and, if I can think of the type of content that would lend itself to such movement, might be something that I would try to incorporate into my personal page.
I prefer the color scheme on the Weight Watchers homepage. The more muted colors appeal to my tastes.
Jonny Bowden’s website incorporates a blogger.com blog and a video at the bottom. I like both of these touches. I also like the navigation bar at the top where the user can click through to the different sections of the page including the blog. I also like the continuity between the blog page and the rest of the page.
The Rapid Weaver program that I am using had a blog page template, but I scrapped that idea for my homepage because of the difficulty in dealing with comments. I am currently modifying the HTML on the two blogger.com blogs that we created to attempt to get that seamless appearance. I am still learning HTML so it took me several hours to get them as far as I have. Because my husband was demanding his turn at the computer and because of the eye strain, I stopped with it partially done.
In my opinion, the Make Goal website is a weak example of a website in the area in which I wish to create my homepage. It is one main page with external links to external webpages. Although it has a video section and a calculator, which are nice features, it appears to be disorganized.
I am still looking for artist pages that are good examples of artists’ pages, although I did find a page dedicated to templates for artists to use to build websites to showcase and sell their art.
The reading this week discussed the linearity of text and the passage of time in art and text. Meadows makes the point that even though text is linear, authors use devices like foreshadowing to make the text appear non-linear, while artists use breaks between panels to show a passage of time in comic strips and similar media. In website design, a webpage may have chunks of very linear text with imbedded links, much like I did in the blog above. The reader may choose to follow the link and jump to another page or topic away from the original text, yet when they jump back to the original text, it should still be there, unchanged, as though no time has passed. Does this make the webpage text more linear or less linear than the text in a book? Or is text, just text and always the same regardless of where it is displayed?
posted by Jessica Badger at
9:12 PM
4 Comments:
As for text being just text, if the reader is looking for specific text, a website should mimic the static aspects of a book. Otherwise, I think there could be some usability issues and frustration on the part of the reader.
Your comments and question about linear text made me think of how there are the link state colors: static, hover, and pressed. These always tend to make me crazy if I am creating a web page or using a web page. I like the thought of the static link color because if I navigate back to the homepage and the link is now the pressed color, my eyes are always attracted to it. I like that it showcases that I have visited that particular page, but I don't like how it is sticking out and capturing my attention.
-Ashley O.
I think that webpages that require a lot of jumping back do tend to hurt the continuity of progression - meaning that when I encounter the need to jump back to return to content or links that take me out of the site, I lose the sense of a continuous experience. As much as it is possible, I prefer websites that keep the content on the site and allow multiple methods on each page to navigate back to where you were without having to hit the back button on your browser. Poor navigation can drive me away from a site quicker than just about anything.
I agree with your assessment of strong and weak pages. Who is your audience, would you say? I think that might help you make some more decisions about what your page might look like.
Very nice tips. Thanks for sharing!
Weight Watchers Points Calculator
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