Functionality of the Nascar.com Website

¶ … functionality is apparent when we compare http://nascar.comand http://www.weather.com.These sights are vastly different in terms of content, color, layout, and design. NASCAR is all about speed and no doubt the site designer attempts to convey speed through visuals and graphic design. Even the page loading is fast. The brand character of the NASCAR website is straightforward and clear, whereas the Weather Network's brand character is more ambiguous. Because weather is such a broad subject and is in itself a neutral thing, Weather.com tells less of a story than NASCAR.com does. Weather.com ends up feeling a little colder and dryer than NASCAR.com.

The NASCAR.com website communicates speed, celebrity, and excitement, all characteristics of the sport itself. The competitive nature of stock car racing demands a bright, engaging site and the designer succeeds at creating a fast-paced online environment. Yet the plethora of multimedia content and color does not outdo the core content of the site (drivers, teams, and race stats). The Weather.com designer, on the other hand, probably had a hard time deciding exactly what story to convey. Granted, weather itself is unpredictable, changeable, and variable across the globe. So there is no one universal theme for weather that can be portrayed in the site design. However, other than the weather maps, there is no attempt to provide any eye candy. Weather.com is functional, period. The NASCAR site excels at emotional impact, while Weather.com falls short.

Both sites are designed to fit in multiple browsers and when screen size is maximized, both sites have substantial margins. NASCAR.com is centered between black margins and Weather.com is left justified in the window, flanked by a white margin on the right. The margins do make the site easier to read, especially if the window is resized. And both sites use tables to create contextual sections within each page. NASCAR.com has a newspaper feel in that some columns use boxes or lines to divide them while some columns are separated only by some space. Lines are simple, thin, and classy. Two skinny double lines separate many of the sections and a sort of horizontal lightening bolt seems to be repeated here and there. This clever use of line produces pages that are easy on the eyes. Category headlines, which are separated by thicker, color-coded lines, break up the page elements without appearing chaotic.

It is quite the opposite with Weather.com. Though there are few actual lines drawn to delineate sections, there is a chaotic feel to each page on the site. It's as if the eye cannot settle on any one element because they all blend into one giant collage of text and hypertext. There are also few changes in background color and texture that would provide a more logical sense of flow.

On the NASCAR site, different elements or categories on the pages have different background colors and textures. Not only does it create easy-to-read, accessible individual pages, but the elements are skilfully repeated from page to page thus protecting the flow of the entire NASCAR website. For example, atop each page is a small section with a thin line rule, reminiscent of music bars, in the background. Because this is repeated on each page in the site, the viewer can get settled in when exploring NASCAR.com. Other elements are repeated, like the feature article of each section, the right-hand menu (perhaps a frame) and columns of similar size. Yet despite the multitude of design elements and text boxes on each page, everything is balanced and in proportion. The designer has a keen sense of rhythm in the placement of all these different elements because the eye is drawn easily from one spot on the page to another.

One of the finer points of the NASCAR.com design is the color-coding of pages coupled with their corresponding navigational buttons. There are five main web site sections, each indicated by a pentagonal button on the top of each page. Deselected buttons are textured using two tones of grey, one for the button label, one for its background. The deselected buttons also display a tiny image resembling interlaced hockey sticks. The color of this tiny image foreshadows the color scheme of the entire section it refers to. When selected, a button lights up in a splash of its corresponding color: Yellow for News; Orange for Drivers and Teams; Aqua for Races; Purple for Communities; and Bright Green for Know Your NASCAR. Clicking a button magically transforms the screen; the entire page changes. Sleek lines point down from the button towards the second-level menu bar and the contents of the page below. Moreover, the color theme is repeated throughout that page, in the background of the NASCAR logo title bar at the top of the page, on lines and bars separating sections and subsections, and on the backgrounds of image frames. This is a truly remarkable design element that distinguishes NASCAR.com as a superbly designed web site.

The pages of Weather.com do not have the same degree of design unity, harmony, or sophistication. It sometimes seems as if a different person designed each page. Sometimes boxes with curved corners separate section from section, and sometimes not. Sometimes there is a map in the center of the page, or a feature article, sometimes not. There are a few common elements repeated throughout the site, like the Weather.com title bar, which contains the "20 Years Weather Channel" logo and the motto "live by it." Most pages are divided into two columns of text or article titles. A menu frame on the top of each page provides some sense of unity within Weather.com, but the bar is a bit too small. Its text is so tiny, the hurried reader might miss it altogether. There is a common navigational cluster at the bottom of each Weather.com page, but it can sometimes only be seen after quite a bit of scrolling down. So while there are common denominators uniting the pages of Weather.com, the site as a whole has little balance or flow. The designer would do well to use scale, color-coding, and more obvious repetition of elements.