Bournemouth and Poole College application
Dominic Crossley
Website review: Arstechnica.com
Arstechnica (Latin for Technological Art) is a news website featuring articles covering software, science, technological policy and video games.
On first entering the domain you are greeted by a clean layout, with a muted palette of seven or eight distinct colours. In an eye-catching bright orange and white, the logo sits in the top left of the greeting banner, which doubles on the bottom edge as a place for navigation tools. I appreciate the practical minimalism of this setup, as it avoids cluttering and gives a uniform first impression. A large expanse of neutral grey fills the rest of the header giving a pleasant and calm impression.
Below this a line of red text displays the current top story accompanied by a small alert icon, a feature which seems some what of an eye sore in contract to the theme of the page. I understand the reasoning behind this in bringing attention to the subject, but I believe it would be more cohesive to use the same colour as the logo to do so.
Further down, the left hand side is occupied by today’s featured article, with a large picture and font accentuating its importance. On the right of this a column that spans the length of the page displays the ‘in depth’ articles. I appreciate this emphasising of content makes the site becomes much more effective in engaging readers.
Three distinct columns occupy the body of the rest of the page, one as already established covers 'in depth’ articles, with 'On the radar’ in the centre and 'Recent Feature Stories’ far right. Each entry under 'In depth and 'Recent Feature Stories’ is accompanied by a picture, tag-line, author, short description and the date on which it was published. The centre column emits the use of a picture. This both saves space and helps signify the the relatively short length of the article (a factor not made overly clear in the column heading). Each article links directly to its own page which despite being an easy system to use, makes the navigation between separate articles arduous. To switch pages the user must go back on themselves to the main page, and from there find new content. A display at the bottom of each page gives the reader a selection of ‘You may also interested in’ content, however I feel this is not an effective way to browse the vast number of article available.
A more effective method may be to implement the ability to scroll through to the next article within the column sub-domain, in particular the ability to move onto the content previously published.
One of my favourite features of the site is in the navigation tools section where, if the ‘Main Menu’ button is hovered over it automatically displays a drop down menu. Here a plethora of options, some quite unusual for are website, are presented. A selection of eight subjects are given linking to pages dealing within their topic matter, a theme changer for the site allows the entire site to be viewed in an alternative format and an ‘Explore Ars’ section gives information on staff, the company and access to the forums.
To summarise, I appreciate the consideration given by designers to ensure that all content is effectively categorised, and that website is both practical and aesthetically pleasing. Despite this, the lack of a few features makes it needlessly time consuming when switching between articles.
