Website Reviews Blog

This is a personal website of Michaela Scherr, a personal transformation coach. Her goal is to help others to achieve inner peace in their lives. The author is a great writer and has alot of cool content to share.

First Impression
Initially, I was really confused of what the website was trying to say. To be truthful, it took me quite a while to figure out what was going on. My observation is that there are 3 forces competing for attention in the site. The author wrote alot of content, trying to tell the reader what "transformation" is all about. There are also 3rd party advertisements and Pay-Per-Click Ads, meaning that the author is into online advertising and business. Lastly, the author is also trying to promote her own e-book and services. The author needs to rethink what she wants to achieve with the website and concentrate on building a theme.

Theme
The colors, fonts, graphics and layout need to gel together to express a common idea. At the moment, things are flying all over the place and I do not experience any peace at all!. If I am the website designer, I might probably work on 2 concepts, "spiritual growth" and "inner peace". Light colors are probably the way to go. Simple layout with lesser text and alot of space might work better than the current system. If the site is about selling the author's services, it needs to be more convincing. Perhaps more images of the author conducting classes or pics of the author might be a good idea.

Navigation
I think the top banner is taking up too much space, considering the amount of information it is conveying to the reader. The top menu is consistent but the left menu is confusing. It will be a big bonus if the left menu has lesser items so that the reader need not scroll so much. The author might also consider using shorter texts with coloured background for each in the menus. Menus in a website should only contain important links to different sections of the site.

Design And Layout
I believe any layout can be effective if information is well organized. There are too many empty spaces at the moment and it makes the website looks awkard. One example is the newsletter page where the reader just keep scrolling without anything to read. Most of the graphics used in the site are clip arts. Clip arts convey a message of "playfulness" and when used in web design, gives people an impression that the website is not serious in what it is trying to say.

There are tonnes of advertisements all over the place. The adsense advertisement on top of many webpages gives people an impression that the site is more interested in marketing rather than have something serious to sell. Promoting adsense too strongly can kill a website. People today are intelligent and they see adsense everyday. Everybody wants to earn extra advertising income but the question is how can we make people click on the ads comfortably...To do that, we must first make people feel comfortable with our site.

Coding
There are signs that the site is trying to be optimized for search engines. The problem is that the opitimization work is done at the expense of the user experience. I am not so worried about the codes at the moment because I believe there are much more important things to be done. I would fix up the aesthetics and user experience issue before looking at the code. Frontpage can produce crappy codes but I believe it can be a good tool for people without programming experience. Frontpage can also produce nice websites and it is just about understanding the software better.

Conclusion
I am a personally fan of philosophy and spiritualism and I believe that michaelascherr.com has a great content to sell. The website needs to undergo a great revamp to communicate more effectively to the end-user. The author has to rethink in what she wants to achieve with the site and set her priority. For example, if she wants good search engine traffic, she will go in the SEO direction and so on...

About the Author
Sitecritic.net Website Reviews is formed by a group of web addicts, mainly volunteers from all over the world. Our goal is to create a community of web designers and developers who share the common interest in bringing out the best in creatiing effective web sites.

The BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, aka the Beeb or Auntie to its friends is the UK most important media organisation funded through licence fees producing TV and Radio programmes for the UK and internationally. The volume of what the BBC produces is truly gargantuan, with eight TV channels and eleven main radio stations, plus local programming and more commercial channels broadcasted internationally, and all this has to be represented under one website. So how does it stand up to the challenge?

Two of the most important factors are, as always, navigation and branding, but the site also wins with a good search option, functionality, and surprisingly few dead links. Let’s start with the branding, at which the BBC have been traditionally – and necessarily – excellent. Their logo and navigation bar is visible on all pages, and each channel (eg. Radio 4) and classification (eg. Arts) has their own bar with its own logo and look which holds consistently with the BBC brand. Each of these sections has their own complimentary colour scheme – funky colours for Children’s pages and more muted colours for the ‘serious’ stuff such as news.

The consistent layout style helps to keep everything cohesive while allowing each area to maintain its unique feel and does this without falling into the trap when using content management systems of looking boxy and bland.With the volume of content - and the Beeb have decided to be enormously generous with both current and archived material - the navigation of this site is absolutely key, and the BBC’s answer has been to use a number of approaches. The major sections are always available at the top of all pages, as is a search box. On the left side of the page, a navigation bar is present and options change to fit with the context of the page.

The right hand side of the window provides useful links for recommended programmes. In true British Institution Tradition, filing has been fully embraced and one of the most useful features is to be able to browse from an a-z listing of programmes, both current and off-air. The keyword search feature works very well, though this is a section where the branding of the site seems to fall down, looking a little incongruous and clunky by comparison to the rest of the site.

The site’s best feature is the Radio Player, which opens in a new window and allows you to stream live or archived programmes using the free-to-download RealPlayer media engine. This works very smoothly, and contains its own navigation, making it incredibly easy to jump between channels using drop-down menus and a-z listings. Streamed TV clips of news, weather and programming is available though a similar method, but is less successful and the quality can be quite low. Well-maintained forums and a great deal of further information on programmes offer a feeling of depth and community to the site – check out www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/archers on the famous Archers radio series – there’s even an interactive map on the fictional village of Ambridge!

This is an excellent example of how to manage a massive amount of content effectively, bringing together a disparate range of programming and genres under one well-branded umbrella. The generosity of content ensures browsers return to the site regularly, and additional features really go the extra mile. As a victim of its success, some areas might be missed due to the size of the site – make sure you visit the Collective area – www.bbc.co.uk/collective which is a fantastic site on contemporary culture in the UK.

About Tim Jukes
Tim Jukes is an artist and designer, born in the UK and currently based in Berlin. He has worked in marketing for a number of years with arts institutions including Chelsea College of Art & Design and Camberwell College of Arts. He works as a freelance web and print designer and also exhibits regularly as an artist, investigating the relationship between technology and the handmade.This article is accurate at the time writing and is published in Sitecritic Website Reviews, Design Ideas and Articles. You may reproduced this article only if this section remains intact.

Dev Bistro is a community resource that lets you search and post Web Development and other Information Technology jobs and find experienced IT Professionals. The job board offers free job posting and you get to contact the employer directly.

If Dev Bistro is the web equivalent of an instant coffee and a plain cheese sandwich. No fuss or fluff – functionality is at this site’s heart. The site is aimed at Web Developers rather than Designers, so in many ways this is appropriate, and I imagine dissuades irrelevant postings from designers seeking work. There is certainly no shortage of job sites out there with many features, but it is Dev Bistro’s simplicity that really appeals, and as a refreshing change, both job and resume posting is free.

Visually, the site is very plain – a grey band at the top with bland imagery is the only visual content to this site, lifted a little by orange header text, which does little to lighten the mood while I do my least favourite task of searching for work. However, this is combated by a nice, open layout and very simple navigation using rollover buttons with alt tag descriptions. Plenty of white space is given throughout the space which allows Dev Bistro to avoid the feeling of claustrophobia given off by most job sites.

Posting jobs and resumes is very straightforward and fast, which will appeal to both busy souls in human resources and jobseekers tired of jumping through several pages to post a simple profile. The text-based HTML site works well with Google and will push up posters’ profiles in search engines, which is always an appealing plus to anyone. Speaking of Google - there are a number of ads by Google on evry page in a similar style to the overall layout which sometimes proves a little confusing.

The search function of the site feels very solid and efficient, allowing the user to search jobs or resumes by keyword, location, expertise, etc. Results are shown in a table with the row background colours alternating white and grey, making it easy to hunt through a long list.

If you start to tire of looking at jobs, Dev Bistro provides some other reading information in the form of articles aimed at developers and walkthroughs of interview questions. This section seems to be steadily growing and should prove to be a very useful resource for the programming community. The wide range of interview questions and answers are practical, clear and thorough and will help people prepare properly for the jobs they are seeking.

Dev Bistro isn’t the looker of the web world, but plays well to its strengths and should serve its community well. This community has been clearly identified and catered for, reflected in the site’s solid design and no frills approach - its simplicity of use contrasts heavily with other more corporate sites and works in a refreshingly straightforward manner.

About Tim Jukes
Tim Jukes is an artist and designer, born in the UK and currently based in Berlin. He has worked in marketing for a number of years with arts institutions including Chelsea College of Art & Design and Camberwell College of Arts. He works as a freelance web and print designer and also exhibits regularly as an artist, investigating the relationship between technology and the handmade.This article is accurate at the time writing and is published in Sitecritic.net - Web Reviews, Design Ideas and Articles. You may reproduced this article only if this section remains intact.