What I was trying to say is that, among these websites, there is a wide spectrum of quality - both in design and content. While most websites serve their purposes unoffendingly, there are some which are truly innovative, and others which just downright nauseate. Here are two examples for your edification:
The website for Moonlighting Film Production Services, based in South Africa, is entirely built in flash. Hitting the enter button (pictured, left) takes you into a winding visual universe, where you can navigate around for information about the company. Aesthetically, the site is a kind of self-contained piece of art -- it is as if it is entirely hand drawn. With sites that are so visually arresting, I often find that the design can overwhelm the content. And while that could be an issue with Moonlighting, I think that they have taken steps to make the site easily navigable. First, while the site is somewhat interactive, it is rather intuitive. You can only travel the "universe" in one direction, and in doing so you will have the option of viewing all of the site's sub pages. If, however, you don't feel like exploring, there is an easily-identifiable "nav bar" at the bottom of the page, where you can access anything on the site. Most subpages are organized well, allowing you to filter information by the country where you are interested in filming (South Africa, Chile or Romania). Also, information, reels, and images are usually contained within their own frames, so there is very little scrolling to do, which is nice for my lazy fingers.Generally I think that Moonlighting succeeds because they are completely cognizant of their audience. Readers who are going to their site are probably going to be prospect customers for film production services. Having a site with innovative and coherent visuals is a sure way to stand out from the pack.
Where to start here? I believe that Haven Works is a sort of news aggregator, but it's hard to tell because the site is just a disaster. Immediately, when you get to the site, there are a million things going on. Maybe, there's a bagillion things going on. Since there is so much wrong going on, I'm just going to overview the "badness" from left to right.On the far left of the site, there is a small bar called "News Topics." Great. I like my news organized. Except for the fact that each category is represented by a tiny picture that was probably drawn by a four year old. Useless. The next column seems to be opinion, or weblog. I don't know if they've decided yet. There's the word blog somewhere with a flashing exclamation mark. I think the exclamation mark would've sufficed without the flashing. Moving to the right -- we have Dem 2010 TV. Not sure what that means. Its not explained. Next, U.S.A., which seems to be American news, but I only know that because there is a tiny American flag at the top of the column. (On a side note, there is a title somewhere in the mess of a header on the site, that reads: American News. USA News. United States of America News --- The Dept. of Redundancy Department would like to give you an award). To the right is a column called TV, again with only pictures created by our favorite four year old, which link to other people's sites. Moving along, there is a "World" column. World News, in the same terrible format as U.S. news. Nice. Have I mentioned that the full text of the articles are printed under the titles, on the main page, in each column?! <-- Can we make that flashing? This feels like a rant. Oh well. The last column is titled Intelligence, Iraq News, or War Crimes. Again, not sure if they have decided. To recap, there are seven colums on the main page, all completely full of text and links and low quality images. A bagillion things going on. Its headache inducing. Havenworks is an ADD child's worst nightmare.
But wait, there's more. I'm going to try to wrap this up soon. The color scheme: Random and neon. Its a cornucopia of fail. The layout: the aforementioned columns are news overkill, the header is equally jam-packed with crap, you could literally scroll for days and not reach the bottom of the site, and nearly any link you click takes you to a havenworks subpage which is equally infuriating. Deep Breaths.
Hi Ian,
ReplyDeleteI'm going to try to make this short because I have to go take Excedrin Migraine after looking at those last two sites for more than 10 seconds. OH. MY. GOD. Having looked at a few of these blog posts, I've decided that you win the award for best worst-website finder. Those are just terrible, on so many levels.
I love the first site. To me, flash websites are the epitome of new media — largely because they're pretty new even to us kids who have grown up with the Internet. But you're right: On sites like this, the design can overwhelm the content. However, because the design is the content in many ways, I think it works. It's not the best website I've ever seen — I like words personally — but it certainly is one of the more innovative that I've seen in a while.
Oops, I meant to keep this short...