Web Design Evaluation

Slash (http://www.slashvan.com/)

Slash provides trasportation from BYU-Idaho to surrounding areas in Idaho and northern Utah. The target audience consists mostly of local college students and therefore appealed to me for this evaluation assignment.

Design

» This web site uses tables for it's main design.
The W3C has established that DIVs should be used for design and tables should be used for tabular data only therefore recoding the site in divs would help the underlying template greatly.
» Another major problem with design is the use of animated gif files which is not reccomended. Not only do they scream amatuer 90's web design, but they distract from the rest of the site. These pictures do not reinforce the content on the page and are unrelated to the services provided.
Removing these images would greatly help the site's overall look and feel and keep the users from getting annoyed. Users tend to ignore moving images immediately because of their over-use in advertisements.
» Another design problem is the inconsistant use of fonts, text size, text color, and link colors. The site's main font is a Serif font, which while great for reading printed material can often be too much for a screen. Also, the blue color used for distinguishing links is also often used to emphasize text which creates more ambiguity.
Using a consistent sans-serif font and emphasizing text without using an established link color will allow better design appearance.
» Also, there are frequent text size changes in the pages which destroys the natural flow of the site and adds ambiguity to the importance of text in design heirarchy. With in-consistant and random content font-size, reading the site becomes a chore and a burden on the eyes.
Websites should keep font sizes for content relatively the same with the exception of headers. Redesigning to these specifications will help users navigate to the sections they wish to view more easily and greatly improve the look and feel of the site. Headers are often a great way to add color
» Another problem width design is the centering of all the text. People generally read left to right thus centering text interrupts the natural flow of the eyes to orphaned phrases positioned randomly based on wrapping and screen-resolution.
Aligning the text to the left will greatly improve design.

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Code Validity

» This website provides no Doctype which comes up as a warning during validation.
Adding a Doctype will allow the browser to properly validate the website according to the language and specifications listed. The solution is simple: add a Doctype to help the browser to interpret, display, and validate properly.
» While observing the numerous errors found on all of the pages, I have noticed a lot of deprecated elements being used (such as the font and color tags) which accounts for numerous warnings in the code.
The website should implement only W3C compliant elements to ensure the document's code validates thus all deprecated elements should be removed or replaced.
» Improper nesting also accounts for a number of the warnings during code validation listed on each page.
The web developer should be more cautious when coding elements into the pages to ensure that elements open and close in their proper order. To allow the page to validate, these tags must be moved to their proper place.

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CSS Implementation

» A major problem with this site is it's lack of CSS Implementation entirely!!
This website desparately needs to implement a CSS stylesheet to their pages to allow the html code to structure the content and leave design up to the css. Stylesheets offer easy design fixes that immediately apply to all pages
» The entire website is designed using code to format and layout the site (tables and deprecated tags like color and font).
This website should only use html to structure data, not format it. Therefore removing deprecated tags and implementing style sheets are a must.

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Usability

» This site had basic functionality but has major orienation/navigational issues. For instance, the top of the pages all look exactly the same when you click on a link in the menu. All of the pertanent content to each section resides beneath the fold of the website. This creates a major usability problem. I didn't even think there was any content to be seen at first!
Provide obvious headers and place important information at the top of each page.
» While the website does have a consistant banner and footer area, the navigation skips around to follow you as you scroll.
Creating a static navigational system (one that does not move) would better help the user orient themselves.

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Accessibility

» The page displays a disclaimer that the site is best viewed with an 800 x 600 resolution or larger. This makes the page less accessible to those who have smaller screen resolutions. Often times people changed their screen resolution to best be able to read text.
The site should be accessible to every screen resolution therefore the site should be recoded to use percentages instead of fixed pixel widths.
» This website requires javascript and displays a message that it must be enabled to access the site.
The soludtion to this is to use other scripting options such as server-side includes which do not require users to activate javascript (many users disable scripting for security purposes).
» This page has no sitemap or alternate text version of pages that rely on javascript.
A sitemap should be provided for those unable to access the rest of the site for whatever reason.
» Some links and images are missing title and alt attributes.
Insering thes despcriptions allow better accessbility to blind users and those using screen readers.
» Header tags and other organizational elements are missing.
Implementing header tages, and breadcrumbs when appropriate will help users better navigate the site and get to the content they need

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