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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	Hmm... I gotta be straight up with you here, Seymour: the site confuses me. Most of the confusion stems from the content and the way the site is set up. For starters, the text on your "home" page doesn't say anything about the site. The fact that the links are operational should be a minor note (although, to be honest, I wonder if it really needs mentioning at all). This page is the first page users see, and it should tell us right away what to expect. Instead, I get the confusing title "The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy* Concepts." When I first saw the title, I thought, "Ah, he's going to talk about concepts addressed in THGTTG, like Infinite Improbability Drive and designing intricate coastlines with fjords. This should be fun." Then I clicked on the "essays" link and was greeted with an essay on something called "The Kissimmee Lakefront playground"--something that has absolutely nothing to do with THGTTG. The next link led to an essay on the Rainforest Cafe. A quick perusal of the remainder of the links ("Future Essay," by the way, is 404) showed that they are not essays, they are reviews. At this point I still have no idea why they are here or what they have to do with THGTTG. Then I clicked on the "concepts" link and finally got an idea of what the title of the web site means. Honestly, those are some really interesting ideas. I think the Restaurant at the End of the Universe could be a really nifty theme restaurant if done right. At this point, I'm thinking, "OK, so these are the concepts, but what are those essays for? And why did he name the site after the content of one single section (out of two)?" Then I read the concept essays through and it started to click. I looked over at the concept menu on the left, then started clicking back and forth between the essays and the concepts--lo and behold, [i]for every "essay" there is a corresponding "concept."[/i] Then it hit me: the essays are on-site reviews you did as preparation/research for your THGTTG concepts. That right there is the lynchpin that holds everything together, but it wasn't until I began writing that last paragraph that everything fell into place. All told, I would say it took me ten to fifteen minutes to figure it out. Now, I've been known to be a bit on the slow side, but the bottom line is that the visitor shouldn't have to guess or try to figure out what a site is about, especially if you are trying to present your ideas to the world. My analysis: interesting ideas with a lot of potential coupled with awful presentation. You may know what you're doing, but no one else does. How do you remedy this? Fortunately, that will not be too hard to do. For starters, I would think hard about the website title. "Concepts" is, in itself, a very abstract word. Try to think of something that will clue readers in quicker (and be more useful in search engines, etc.--remember, your site title is not just a pretty face). More importantly, though, you need a brief explanation on the home page telling people what you're doing here. Explain your overall goal and how you went about doing these reviews and coming up with the concepts. In a word, it needs to be better organized. Leave the "Concepts" section heading if you like, because that more or less describes what's in the section, but "Essays" needs work. You may want to try "Reviews" (as I mentioned above). Also, while brevity is always nice, there's no law that says each section title has to be one word only. If you need more than one word to describe what's there, so be it. And while an explanation on the home page will go a long way to clueing people in, I also think it's important that you tie the reviews and concepts together. Discuss what you're looking for when you do your reviews, then talk about what you learned and how you can apply it to your concept. In fact, here's an idea: since the reviews and concepts should really go hand in hand, why not scrap the separate sections and put them together? The review could go at the top of the page and then you can go right into what you learned from it, how you're going to apply that to your concept, and how your concept will be different. I think it would be nice to have them together so it's easier to make the connection. There are other, minor things that I could mention. For example, the order of the navigation links: I would put Home on top and switch the order of Essays and Concepts (after all, the concepts are the important part). I'm not sure why you need your resume, and I wonder if you might not be able to change that to something a little less formal, like an "About me" page. You can still have resume-type information if you want. Nitpicks: the starfield background is repetitive (ie, it's very easy to see the tiling), but this is a problem with backgrounds like this. You might want to play around with it a little to see if you can make it less obvious, though. Also, the way the page sticks to the top and bottom of the browser bugs me slightly, but more so on the home page--probably because it's this tiny box right now that's stuck to the top of the window. Maybe this won't be such an issue when you get more content in there. Like I said, though, those are nitpicks and minor issues. The main thing here is your information architecture. What you say is important, but how you say it is equally important. Ideas are only as good as their presentation. Don't be discouraged, though: you have some interesting ideas, now you just need to make the presentation clearer. _____ * The DA geek in me must point out that Mr. Adams never wrote anything called "the Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." This is merely the title of a collection of his Hitchhiker works. :) [Edit: Forgot to mention this is my minor quibbles... the table for the header links makes me cringe.] ___________________________ Suho: [url=http://www.liminality.org]www.liminality.org[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/4837]Cell 270[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/5689]Sig Rotator[/url] \| [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/22173]the Fellowship of Sup[/url] \| "Hooray for linguistic idiots and yak milk!" [small](Edited by [internallink=2031]Suho1004[/internallink] on 04-15-2005 04:46)[/small] Loading...
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