Online musings of a T183 student

In Lesson 2 a task requires: Take a look at http://www.ft.com and see what you think. Does this page display in your browser with its normal settings? What do you think about the length of the page? Is it too long for you? The page has some animations. Do you think they make it more attractive or more readable?

In our browser at home (AOL) the page in fact displays with quite a lot of white space on the right hand side. The full width is visible and the white space doesn't particularly add or subtract from the experience.

However the page is way too busy, hundreds and hundreds of words of dynamic content which although it was grouped together was still quite overwhelming.

It's not so much the length of the page that is the problem, but the amount that is crammed into that space.

The animated parts of the page range from mildly to very irritating. In particular, in a prominent position on the page, there is a car advertisement. If you hover over this the advert expands into an even larger advert. You then have to click away - on a neutral part of the page - to remove the advert and see the text underneath.

I didn't feel inspired to follow up any links or to explore the site any further: it tries too hard.

In defence of the site, I guess that FT readers are probably used to scanning loads of columns of tiny figures (tables of stocks and shares etc) so maybe the site is sticking with that m.o.

In Lesson 2 there is a session on typefaces which lives at this address

The Lesson asks us to critique the page itself, so here goes, albeit not very thorough.

This isn't the world's liveliest looking web page but there's a lot to be said for a plain design. However I could have done without the background image. It didn't make the text harder to read, necessarily, but it was distracting. I also found the default text size a little small.

If readability is to be improved I would suggest wider margins either side, maybe putting all of the text into a centre-aligned table set at 90% width. That way there would be 5% white space either margin and it would make the lines shorter. Bumping up the text size by one magnitude might not hurt either. Similarly, more generous line spacing might render the text a little less "monolithic".

I was very surprised to see the two links to external websites were presented in a text only format, i.e. not as hyperlinks.

These were they:

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/

This uses a san serif font with some headings at roughly double the size and others in a smaller font using block capitals. The styling used for links means that they are not delineated except by colour though they appear underlined when you hover over them. The main menu is in block capitals. On the whole the site has a relaxed and uncluttered look and though the text is small it is readable because it's well spaced out. I don't much like the shouty capital letters though.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx

This has a businesslike look to it with the body text mainly in a serif font. However the side menu is sans serif as are some headings - I don't think the mixture works terribly well, it looks like two different web pages in frames (with no borders).
The subheadings are in italics which look rather odd while links are a rather vivid red. But on the whole no better or worse than the other one.

Personally I would recommend against specifying fontfaces in a web page simply because you can't guarantee your user will have it on their system. Relative sizes are fairly predictable and so are colours... so long as you stick to the web-safe palette.

I got cracking on this course a few days early as I knew I would be away fro part of next week (the official start) and was keen to make sure I didn't end up falling behind. There's nothing worse is there.

This web page is a review of the first week (it's exercise 3 within session 5).

In summary: a pretty good week!

Evaluation of the Open University website:

Overall evaluation: A good website. Functionality: A+ Aesthetics:B+

Read more!

The Real Life Coach website is quite wonderfully bad.

• The marvellous variety of fonts, font sizes, styles and colours takes real chutzpah (and yet not a single one is interesting to look at!)
• There's so much stuff, absolutely no attempt to chunk things down into manageable sections
• Remarkably, the page gets worse as you go lower down. I didn't see the kitchen sink, but it may well have been there somewhere
• The Micro$oft Word clip art is not really very classy...
• There seemed to be a form - which I didn't dare fill in - to subscribe to an "e-zine". This appeared twice, one beneath the other.
• Underlined stuff that wasn't a link after all - - - argh!!!
• There was a silly animated thing of a letter coming through a letterbox, presumably an "email me" link (I was too scared to click it and see). This appeared three times in the left hand column. Why? In case you changed your mind in the second or two it took to scroll between them?
• The content was pretty off-putting... What do you suppose this bit means:
  

  Most people -- just like you -- don't decide not to take action on their goals.

  They just don't decide TO take action.

Can I think of any good features? Er, no!

That's probably quite enough for now. Overall evaluation: rubbish!