Blog Topic #8 : Sapient vs. Oslaw

After looking through all the listed sites for possible review and analysis, I decided to look at sapient.com and oslaw.com.

SAPIENT

In the most basic sense, sapient helps there clients, "innovate in the areas of marketing, business, operations and technology." Their goal is to, "to partner with companies in a spirit of collaboration to help them evolve and grow in today’s dynamic marketplace."

Sapient.com is a very cool and stylish looking website. They have a monochromatic orange based color scheme which I think is very "hip". I think the look and feel is effective because it comes off as being very professional, but still playful at the same time. The navigation is the coolest part, in my opinion. The home page starts with the navigation of the right side, and when you roll over it, the entire original 5 links expand into an array of different options to click on. This really helps the user get to exactly where they want to go quickly, without having to search around the site.

I played around a little with the sites features and hypothetically what I would be doing if I was actually interested in there services. Overall it seemed pretty easy. The site does have ALOT of information though, and its a good thing that it is structured so well.

Immediatly when you visit this site it is obvious that it uses flash, as well as HTML and javascript. It probably uses some kind of server technology as well for its clients in a database. What it is I'm not sure.

Right now I'm sitting at a 19" wide screen monitor, and I can view the site perfectly with huge margins. If I bring the open window from my extended desktop to my laptop I can still see everything I saw before (15.4" monitor on laptop)

This site is probably not super unique. It has nothing that has not been done before, but in general, what they've done has been done well.

Overall, I would give the site a 8/10. Sometimes the navigation can be a bit funky and will trick you by moving to the top instead of the right side. Generally this is fine, but for an old grandma (who probably wouldn't be using this site anyway) it might cause some confusion.


OSLAW

As soon as I opened this site I did not like it. It does not look professional and does not look well designed.

This line pretty much sums up what oslaw does, "Our philosophy is that we do best what we know best - litigation and trial work." Basically they are lawyers.

The main communication objective of this site is to tell about oslaws services. They have sections for what they do, who they are, getting it done, and results.

The site itself it a bit of a mess. There is no real title... Well there is, but its at the bottom of the page, stupid. At the top of the page is a thin purple area for the main nav. and the pages main content section is in a giant unstructured white area in the middle of the page without margins. Or at least you can't see the margins. At the bottom of the page is the title and name of the company, as well as contact information.

As far as navigation and getting around on the site, it does pretty well. The navigation is pretty straight-forward, with the main nav. at the top of the page horizontally, and secondary nav. on each of the main navs pages. The main nav. is set up so that the button remains highlighted when you are on the corresponding page. This can be nice sometimes, but its not quite working here. There just isn't enough to let us know what page we are on. The secondary nav. is OK. The text is very small, probably 7pt, and is even smaller than the content text, which seems silly to me. I didn't even notice this until just now, there is more "main" navigation on the bottom section of the page next to the title.

The site really doesn't have a definable look and feel. It's very boring, very little graphical content, plain text. Blah. I really don't think the design of this site was really thought out. It really feels like it was just thrown together in an afternoon.

I feel pretty confident that I could easily get in contact with a rep. from the company if I wanted to. The site certainly needs work, but its not hard to navigate.

From what I can see the site just uses basic HTML and some javascript/css.

Overall, the site needs work. 6/10.

Blog Topic #2 : planetphotoshop.com

Planetphotoshop.com yet another tutorial based site. This one I really like though. Photoshop is the kind of program where no matter how versed you are in it, there will always be something new and cool to learn. This site has many of the newest and coolest techniques.

The site is designed well and its generally pretty easy to find what you're looking for. It has a video tutorial section with lots and lots of tutorials, and it has a section for regular tutorials. It also has a great forum and review section.

Blog Topic #2: Steve's Tutes

Steve's Tutes (http://www.video-animation.com/) is a site where a guy named Steve creates and links out to numerous video tutorials. Most of the tutorials are for the various versions of Flash, but there are also HTML, Photoshop, Java, and general video capture tutorials.

Some of the tutorials are good, some bad, some excellent, and some terrible. So It's a bit of a gamble when choosing one. I personally LOVE video tutorials because it is the next best thing to being in an actual class room. You can actually watch in real time what the person is doing, and how they are doing it. Often, the tutorials will come with a sample file as well so you can decontruct the process if you wish.

The site itself is pretty bad. It's basically just a linking site, with about half original content. It would help if it was a bit better designed though.

Blog Topic #7 : What's a favicon???

A favicon is is that little icon you will often see next to a websites URL which is basically just another way to identify the site. Favicon's are also known as website icon, page icon, or urlicon and is short for "favorites icon". Today, favicons are used by almost all large scale and high traffic websites, and even the majority of smaller sites (so long as the designer knows what they are doing). Besides being displayed next to the URL in the address bar, favicons can also be seen on bookmark lists, and in tabbed document interfaces.

Here are a few examples of some familiar favicons:





Youtube, Google, and Myspace. All pretty recognizable icons that immediately identify the site.

Favicons are uploaded to your website by using a file called "favicon.ico". Before you create your favicon you have to download a photoshop plugin which supports the .ico file format. To create your favicon, use photoshop while keeping in mind a few things. First off, a favicon is only 16x16 pixels, which means there is a good chance that your standard logo may not look good at that size (if its even square). Apparently the best way to go about creating your favicon is to use a 64x64 px canvas size and resize the image to 16x16 when finished. Also, when you resize your image use the "Bicubic Sharper" setting, which caused the image to blur less when resizing.

Every site can benefit from a favicon. Some people can remember a image or graphic far easier than a URL and when they see the sites favicon, they know what site it is without reading the address. Why not have one? They are fairly easy to create (a real memorable good one may be more difficult) and upload to your site, and they make your site seem more professional.

Blog Topic # 6 : Experience Design

Experience design, also sometimes known as experimental design is, "The practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments -- each of which is a human experience -- based on the consideration of an individual's or group's needs, desires, beliefs, knowledge, skills, experiences, and perceptions." Basically, its an approach to creating a enjoyable and productive experience for people in a certain medium, in this case, web or multimedia interface design. (Nathan Shedroff)

When considering a websites design, most designers will consider the sites usability and/or the users "experience" while visiting the site. Some will make a site which is highly intuitive and strictly for usability purposes. Most e-commerce sites are built this way. A site which uses the idea of experience design is something far more interactive and interesting to browse through than a site focusing on usability. Personally, I like sites which are about halfway between, something that creates an awesome experience for the user, but at the same time is easy to navigate and is usable.

Here is a site that I absolutely love. My goal is to be able to do something this awesome someday (even though I'm sure this site had about 15 people working on it.)

http://2advanced.com/

This site is seriously so cool. Completely build with flash, it sort of simulates its own stand alone computer touch screen interface. I imagine walking through a spaceship and finding this interface on a random wall somewhere. The point is, I don't have any trouble navigating this site, but at the same time I actually find it enjoyable to do so.

To conclude, I think the most successful sites are the ones which can successfully mix a great unique user experience with intuitive and simple usability.