Untitled Document

FP23

The better designed site : Yahoo!

The poorly designed site: The Academy of Nursing, Salt Lake City, UT

Criteria	Yahoo!	Academy of Nursing ,The

Web Site URL	Yahoo!	Academy of Nursing, The

Authentication	Yahoo is pretty much the defacto standard for website design. It was very easy to find links and contains proper information about its purpose, sources of information and also when it was last modified	They have a mission statement which describes their goals but not information on when their web page was last modified and also no clear objective about their purpose
Aesthetics	Their website is really easy to navigate and contain no pop-ups. Excellent use of colors for backgrounds and links and the text. Excellent organization of information.	Their website contains a lot of popups, frames, and unnecessary Flash. Their text is small light blue on a white background, and some of their links open up a new window and a popup.
Performance	Pages load fast and very minimal use of graphics on their website, espically on their frontpage and search results page.	Pages load slow because of flash. They have too many flash images downloading and pages are short but take time to load because of flash and images.
Consistency	Very Consistent. Same background and excellent use of templates that are uniform throughout their site.	Their website has uniform colors but Navigation techniques are different for many pages. Popups load for some links, sometimes more than one for certain links.
Validity	Most pages seem to be proofread before being posted online. All links are active and considering the size of Yahoo! it is impressive. Also their website looks the same in IE or in Netscape.	There are pages with typos and grammatical errors. It appears the same in IE and Netscape. Pages need to be proofread. Links are active.
Images	Yahoo! does support text only browsers. Proper use of thumbnails and also include the size of images and movies next to their links.	Images look pixilated. No size information on pictures or movies as users have no choice but to let the page load. Also, they have no information on supporting text only browsers, so it can be presumed that they do not.
Hyperlinks	Have a good Navigation Bar. All pages have links to their home page and can also use the navigation bar to go a level up.	No proper Navigation. Use Javascript to send the user one page back, which is not correct. Includes a link to the home page.
External Files	External files include but are not limited to flash, quicktime files, WM files etc but all of them have their size next to their links.	External files include Flash, Animated GIF's but not size indication. User has no choice in viewing them because they load automatically.