Tuesday 1 April 2008

Competetive Analysis

http://www.iceimmediate.com/

The first thing I notice about this site is its appearance, it is at a high standard visually. I notice that the banner is actually a Flash animation and there is also a Flash slide show. I think that Flash animations can sometimes be overbearing and annoy the user but this banner has only a subtle animation which ties in well with the theme and subject matter.

Their is a main navigation bar directly under the banner which I think is become a standard way of laying out navigation, especially with large sites. In addition to this however there is a secondary navigation down the left hand side of the page. It appears that the use of the two separate navigation systems is to separate product information, which is the left hand navigation and site function which is the top navigation.

I think the benefit of separating these two systems out is that it feels much easier to find the required link and navigate the site without it being complicated.

The site is consistent in layout and the main structure of the navigation and banner stays rigid, when the content links are clicked the main display in the center changes. This adds to the sites aesthetic appeal.

The colour scheme also ties in with the theme of the site making use of cold colours such as white and blue. These two colours are the only ones in use though two shades of blue are actually used. The selected images do not stray much from this colour scheme which could be down to the subject matter however it does seem that they have been carefully selected to ensure this professional overall look and feel is maintained.

I would say the mood of this site is corporate and yet exclusive, this has been created by the slick fonts and colour scheme.

To purchase from this site the process seems quite unusual as you are actually required to complete an order form and then post or fax this to the company. I would have thought that with the standard of the design of this site that it would have actually been an e-commerce site.

This I feel completely lets the site down. I think that even if it would be immediately possible to make a purchase due to the nature of the order then it should at least have a form page that could be submitted digitally.

Overall I do like this site and I would hope to create something that is to this standard of design.



http://dryicedirectory.com/

This site is completely different to the previous and quite obviously has been built by an amateur designer. One thing that is quite obvious is the complete lack of any clear navigation system and on further investigation it seems that the links to the left are actually the navigation.
The way in which theses links are presented is confusing and I personally believed that they were links to an external site. Once clicked the links lead to pages within the same site and the navigation system changes in its appearance leading to further confusion.

The sites product is selling Dry Ice and it seems a little to heavy on explaining what Dry Ice is. I would assume when selling a product that my customer had a fair idea of what it was that they wanted to purchase and would have tried to keep this down to a minimum just providing the very basics. When confronted with the amount of information actually provided I am completely put off from reading any of it due the masses of text, this could be another design issue.

In regards to purchasing ice on this site it is not possibly to order online again. This site is set out as a directory and actually requires you to contact the nearest supplier of dry ice and then arrange the shipping of it.

This site is one let down after another the only thing that seems right is the colour scheme but then the choice of blue and white for an ice related website doesn't seem too much of a stretch for the imagination.

The overall design is terrible right down to the use of clip art in the top left hand corner of the the site.


http://www.eskimo-ice.co.uk/index.php

I think that this third example is probably the best of the three, just. This third site again has strong design connections with the theme of ice making use of the cold colour scheme but in addition to this it has added design features with ice graphics. This adds to the design of the site and makes it visually more interesting and intricate.

One thing I would say is that the colours in the banner may be slightly off with the rest of the site and could benefit from being stronger shade of blue rather than the green tint that it has.

One thing I feel that makes this site stronger in terms of design rather than the first site that I looked at is that it has just one navigation bar at the top. It makes use of a drop down menu to offer further, related, options when you scroll over the ice sculpture option which I think makes the navigation of the site neater and easier to negotiate.


Again like the other sites this site does not offer the ability to purchase online and requires you to contact the dealer by telephone. Again I think this is down to the nature of the product than the lack of programming ability of the host. If the site were to simply offer the purchase of bags of ice then I think it would have been capable of selling the product online.

I am not usually a fan of a gradient background on a web page but in this case I feel it is an appropriate use and ties in with the theme and not just a lazy shortcut to add some sort of design feature.

Overall of the three I do think this final site is the strongest but only slightly, it was very close between the first one and the third one. I think it was the navigation that was the decider as both sites had very strong visual impact and very slick in their execution.

Monday 31 March 2008

Target Audience

Target Audience One

Kevin is a 27 year old male bar manager. He works a 40 hour week with the day to day running of the bar. It is his job to find suppliers with the best prices for the stock and earns around £25k per year. He is an experienced web user and goes online almost once every day for about one hour each time. He goes online at home and occasionally at work but both he tends to use it for recreation. He will sometimes use the internet at work when contacting suppliers by email. He connects to the internet by Broadband with a 2MB connection and visits sites such as Facebook and Yahoo and looks at BBC for sport. Access is PC based and he uses Internet Explorer 7 and he makes an average of one internet purchase per month.

Target Audience Two

Rachel is a 30 year old female working as a lead designer at a medium sized, Leeds based, Design Company. Rachel earns £30k per year and works a 38 hour week. She is a savvy web user and is online at least 5 hours per day. Rachel accesses the internet form home and also as part of her job role which incorporates website design. She uses the internet for research and checking emails, in her personal time she uses it to download music and make online purchases. The sites most often visited are Yahoo, Topshop and i-tunes. Access is from a PC and uses Firefox she makes an average of 2 online purchases per month.

Delivery Requirements

XHTML 1.0 Strict
The content of my site will be place in a HTML document. All of the content will be sorted into seperate 'divs' which will then be arranged and style using one CSS document.

CSS 2.1
CSS will be used for styling as this is a quick and easy method to edit numerous pages at once, also it will make loading times faster. CSS will provide a better result in search engines and help to adhere to the W3C guidelines 1.0. I will use CSS 1 and CSS 2 as they are the most widely supported versions in current browsers.

PHP 5
PHP 5 will be used if I am to use a form element for the e-commerce site. Thsi version is the latest version of the language that is supported by my webhost.

Goals

1. To design a site that meets the requirements of W3C guidelines 1.0. This is important for making industry standard sites.

2. To create a website in XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS 2.1 that validates at http://validator.w3.org/. This also is important in regards to industry standard sites and would be something employers might check when looking at my application.

3. To produce a site that's purpose is for e-commerce. I chose this subject as I think it would benefit me when looking for employment. In addition I would benefit from having this knowledge if I wanted to work freelance.


4. To produce a corporate identity for the pseudo company. This is so that I have more examples to show in interview of my design ability in terms of corporate identity work. I would benefit from having more examples of logo design and also some examples of designing letter heads and email templates, this I will incorporate into the brief. The corporate identity will include a logo, business card, email template and letterhead.