Army-issued veterans site

Founded by Chuck Reickoff, author of the fantastic "Chasing Ghosts, based on his experience as an American occupier of Iraq just after the fall of Baghdad, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America organization aims to help soldiers adjust to life back in the world, educating them on their benefits and lobbying Congress on their behalf on issues like the GI Bill.

Upon first impression, one may think this site is Army-commissioned, but it's an independent organization. The color palette - green, tan and gold - is appropriate for the site, but it risks the aforementioned confusion.

The site does well on the CRAP test.

Contrast: The site uses its color palette effectively to clearly indicate different elements and sections. The layout is designed to look somewhat like an open folder, as if the viewer was privy to a military brief. The green main nav bar and links are easy to find and recognize. 

Repetition: The site is consistent with its navigation and content, and from page to page, viewers should have no problem finding elements.

Alignment: The page tends to skew to the right, with a secondary nav bar in the right division. The site uses multimedia elements well, and nearly every page has a dominant video or photo image. 

Proximity: Great padding throughout. Clean design.

Bad website...well, sort of

How ironic. My family moved to Clinton Township last summer and this is my first time visiting the city's website because of a class assignment. If I were a newcomer to the website with no knowledge of web design, I would think the page was fine.

However, that's not the case now.

There are some positives about it. The site is well organized, no crazy color scheme (the blue, white and gray fits the mood of the site), no ridiculous icons and navigation is there for everyone to see.

Now on to the negatives.

The first thing I noticed was the homepage failed to provide a blurb, telling you what website's purpose. I guess they assumed the banner info was enough. You figure it out. Another noticeable thing was the primary navigation bar. It irked me because when I went over any of the links, a list of other links would appear. There's just too much information for that and it makes everything looks cluttered.

For example, when you drag the mouse over the "Welcome" bar, only one link appears. It's just not necessary. A small, yet significant observation were the divs, particularly on the right side were longer than others. In regards to the navigation again, it can become confusing because if you click on a link, you have no way of getting back to the homepage and the primary navigation completely changes. The website also has important information below the scroll and when I dragged my mouse over the links or tried to click on them, the color remained the same. One of my pet peeves are advertisements randomly on the side of websites and this one succeeded in doing this. There are ads on both sides of the site.

Overall, the website is not a horrific one. Yet, there is too much going on in terms of information all over the place and appearing to cluttered. It could use some multimedia elements to make the site more lively (maybe interviews with residents for example). They're off to a good start, but there's always room for improvement.

Sprint: Plug into Now.

The purpose of this Web site is to... Well, it's hard to say, right? That's the main reason I chose it. No doubt people who stumble upon the site will ooh and aah at the sleekness of the product. After all, it's from Sprint. However, despite the beauty of it, this site was listed as one of the worst Web sites of 2008 on WebPagesThatSuck.com, and here are some reasons why, provided by myself and Vincent Flanders. (Click to see what he had to say about it via YouTube.)

For one thing, the navigation is unfriendly at best. The main site is cluttered with widgets that do not fit on smaller screens (definitely not 955 x 600 pixels). Worse is that in order to get to the widget on the bottom left, you have to use your mouse and shimmy yourself over there. Why not make life easy for people and allow them to scroll? If you go to another window or tab, the site automatically scrolls to the bottom right for you (so when you go back, you have to manually shimmy yourself back to the top left for the semi-relevant information). I don't really care about how useless the widgets are because that decision was clearly intentional, but the most important (if not only) important element on the page is practically invisible in the mess of pointless information.

Once you finally realize the only effective link is the "Take it to go with Mobile Broadband" button, our big question ("What is this?"), is finally answered on the new page, which features the sky view of a city. Little speech bubbles pop up randomly with equally random messages. When you roll over certain locations, bubbles follow you around, but still some popups are random, and the first time I was on the site I spent a bit too much time trying to figure out whether I was having a Beautiful-Mind moment or not. Again, it takes a lot of concentration to not focus on the city and actually read the blurb on the left, which vaguely defines the product and finally gives you a link to a purchasing page (which is a clear and concise subpage of Sprint - thank goodness!)

It's not that I don't think the two pages and their ideas are cool - I can picture plenty of people having fun "in the moment". But, as Flanders notes, the "metaphor navigation" is distressing. The creator obviously knows Flash, but as we have discussed in class, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Actually, all the important elements are there, but they are overpowered by the widgets on the first page, and the popups on the second. Never at any moment in time do I get a concrete sense of what the product is, so never do I want to purchase the product - which I still don't fully understand. Maybe a Sprint user would know better?

The site definitely has redeeming qualities. It's a mess, but at least it doesn't give you seizures. And the idea of always knowing what's going on at any second of the day? That's always been a hot topic. I'm sure males respond positively to the sexual voiceover. I definitely got a good laugh out of it when she said, "Feel free to touch it." Yep, that's what she said!

If the purpose is only to entertain, then thank you Sprint, you have succeeded. It is a very pretty site, and you let me play pong on a 50 x 50 sized widget. However, I think Sprint's goal is to sell me something, and based on the Web site alone, I am not buying.