Autumn Bernhard

For my final project I want to make a website on Texas State Krav Maga. I don’t think a lot of students don’t know about this group on campus and it would be beneficial for them. The pages on the site could be about the group (home), history of Krav Maga, classes offered and why take them, videos and contact. I think with this topic, there would be a lot of opportunity to have visuals to accompany the information. I could interview people who take the class, the instructors and the people who started the group. Video could be of an interview with b-roll of people taking the class.

For my next website, I would like to talk about different television shows. I watch many different shows and think that it would be a cool to write about some of the most popular shows. I would include a basic summary about each series and show information.

I have ideas for six different web pages that would be the following:

• Drama
• Comedy
• Reality
• Crime
• Romance
• Archives (old shows that are still popular or watched by many)

Each page will have a few shows on each page accompanied by a picture and a possible video or link to where videos can be viewed. I like how CMT did their website and will follow it for some of the things on my website. I think a sidebar with a schedule of showings would be a cool thing to incorporate also.

My favorite website that I use often is Wired. I really like this website because of how it is laid out and consistent throughout each page. Although there are a lot of news websites out there I think this one is different due to how easy it is to navigate.

This website utilizes the “strive for feature exposure” principle very effectively. Every page has the navigation banner with each news category (business, culture, design, gear, science, security and transportation) across it to help the user flip through pages easily. Also, there are arrows that the visitor can switch through each page that has all the news articles on it.

With everything on this website I am very impressed that they have managed to keep so much whitespace. Every background is the same and the articles are centered on the page with air on each side. The spacing between each article and photo also adds to the whitespace.

This website is very easy to access and doesn’t “squander users’ patience.” To view the website one does not have to log in or subscribe to it which is very much appreciated. In fact, the only places that they are asking for your personal information is at the bottom of the website which takes a while to scroll down to. In fact, I rarely make it down that far because I read articles on the “suggested for you” section.

One of the things that I think the website can do better is making it a bit simpler visually. There is a lot of content on each page that overwhelms the viewer when they first get to there. I think there should be fewer items on the home page to help with this. However, everything is divided into categories and color coded which helps group everything together making it a bit less overwhelming.

Another area that could be improved is focusing the user’s attention. Due to all the articles that are on the website there is obviously a lot to be seen. I think a way to try to help with this is dividing things more so there aren’t so many news briefs on a screen at once. I think they attempted to help viewers with this by varying sizes of each headline and photos on the pages.