Website evaluation and redesign recommendations for Weddings by Alice

¶ … Weddings by Alice Web Site Evaluation

This paper reviews a wedding planner's website, Weddings by Alice, located at this URL: http://www.weddingsbyalice.com/. The review covers architecture as well as design elements, including site organization, navigation, page layout, and graphic content. Our analysis also discusses effective design principles, and we cite examples where they were followed and where they were not. Throughout the paper we make a series of suggestions for improvement. Rather than isolating them as a group towards the end of the paper, they are presented throughout the paper as each design element is discussed. At the end of the paper we provide mockups of a redesigned homepage and secondary page done in PowerPoint which incorporate some of our proposed changes.

Site Purpose

We began the Web site evaluation by analyzing the site's purposes and goals. According to the article "Designing an Effective Web Site," "The nature and substantive content of your website should be based upon its purposes." We assume that the website owner intended her site to be a key part of her marketing plan, using it to promote her wedding planning business. The site achieves its purpose, although not as efficiently as it might if more Web design principles had been adhered to.

One yardstick for judging effectiveness is considering whether the site was designed with the nature and behavior of the intended audience in mind. Without studying any specific demographics, we know that the intended audience for wedding planning services would be engaged couples and their families. The site has the functionality as well as look and feel that the target audience would expect. It is sufficiently easy to navigate that parents of the bridal couple would be comfortable visiting the site, while at the same time the site has the energetic look and feel is attractive to couples across a broad range of ages and lifestyles. The site manages to be neither cluttered, overwhelming, boring nor plain. Still, it must also be observed that the site could be more engaging, if it adhered to more of the design principles this paper discusses. As the article 6 Web Design Principles to get Visitors to Stay Longer points out, a website's design goes a long way toward getting readers to stick around longer, browse more pages, and return more often. "Readability and accessibility can be key" (Gentile 2010).

Visual Elements

While there are many principles that determine good Web design, experts agree upon several. The 7 Key Principles That Make A Web Design Look Good (Coolen, 2009) offers this list:

Balance

Grid

Color

Graphics

Typography

White space

Connection

Coolen notes that balance is "all about ensuring that your design does not tip to one side or the other." (2009). Closely related to balance is the concept of grids, the series of horizontal and vertical rulers that help to compartmentalize a design. The resulting columns make a page's content easier to absorb. Our review site is balanced and the minimalist design of the site makes good use of grids.

Color, on the other hand, does not work as well on this site. As Coolen puts it, "Every color sends out a message, and it is up to you to get the message right." (2009) Graphics should add to the visual message, but in the case of our website, they don't work well with the color. This site's typography is focused on making the site look interesting and pretty, which happens at the cost of giving several pages a busy texture.

Coolen defines white space as having to do with what is not there. The review site uses it unevenly. Coolen goes on to discuss "connection," which he admits is a term he made up, at least in the context of design principles; he uses it to refer to a Web design that has both unity and consistency. Using Coolen's definition, our review site comes up short (2009).

Ben Hunt offers another perspective on Web design in Web 2.0 How-To- Design Style Guide: "Use as few features as are necessary to achieve what you need to achieve." (2006). The basic simplicity of our review site is one of its better features.

Website design companies understand how important it is to provide visual stimulus, especially to attract initial attention. Having said that, the use of visual elements on this site needs improvement. The simplicity of the layout is appealing, but the graphic is ineffective and doesn't serve to focus the eye. The site uses central layout for 1-3 columns, which contributes to its simplicity of design as well.

The site design makes good use of white space, reducing the cognitive load for visitors. Smash Magazine recommends that a page provide users with a sense of visual hierarchy, which this site does. There is also continuity of style between pages, which maintains a cohesive and consistent look.

One design principle that was not as frequently mentioned was justification. Tara Gentile points out that "When it comes to the main content of your blog or website, center justification doesn't work. It's hard to read because your eyes need to find the starting point of the next line at a different place every time. When your text is left-justified or fully justified, your eyes go to the same place on the page with each new line." (2010)

User Interface Design

As Suzanne Martin discusses in effective Visual Communication for Graphical User Interfaces, there are three fundamental principles to follow in the use of visible language: organize, economize and communicate. This site is organized well enough, with a clear and consistent conceptual structure. There is consistency, the screen layouts are functional and easily navigated. On each page only the elements that are critical for communication have been included, making the site very economical. However, the most important elements are difficult to pick out; they just don't stand out enough. As for communication, this site could rate higher on readability. One recommendation for improvement would be the use of fewer typefaces and point sizes.

Color

This site could make more effective use of color. The home page suffers from some degree of color confusion, with there being too many elements competing for the viewer's attention. There also needs to be more contrast in value and chroma for the home page graphics. The color scheme seems needlessly limited. On the plus side, there is sufficient contrast between background and text, and no patterned background to produce noise that would interfere with reading the text.

Gentile explains why color needs careful consideration: "The colors you use on your website & (sic) in your text not only communicate your brand but are the primary way readers access your information." She points out that "You one can use all sorts of color theory guidelines to help you pick colors that work best for your branding and your business; however, you must also consider what kinds of colors work best on the web." (2010)

Technical Performance

This site loads quickly, in less than 2 seconds; navigating between pages is equally quick. The meta tags are correctly positioned at the top of the page, and are filled out properly. We found that visited links do not change color, so the reader cannot easily see which page has been viewed; we recommend this easy fix to improve navigation.

A similar design issue is making sure that links are "readable, prominent, and in keeping with the style of the rest of your site" (Gentile 2010). The rationale for this modification is simple: If links don't look different, people won't know to click on them. Or, if the color is unreadable, people won't understand what they're saying. And if they're not prominent, people will ignore them. We checked all links and found them to be active, in addition to being readable and prominent. One missing basic structural component is a site map page, but given that the site is fairly basic, a missing site map is not a serious shortcoming.

Another element of technical performance is resolution. Montecino advises that the "standard for screen resolution is 800 (width) by 600 (height). If you design for a higher resolution the user may have to scroll back and forth or up and down to view your full content." (2009) Resolution for this site appears to meet the standard guidelines.

To this site's credit, there are no visually irritating effects to overpower the user, such as scrolling text or constantly running animations. The site is also correctly hosted on an organization server. We were unable to review the site on different browsers, or different versions of browsers, and so cannot evaluate whether pages display consistently. (Internet Explorer 7 was installed on the systems we used.)

Required Information

The site is missing several instances of necessary data. The home page provides a telephone number, but no email address and no company address. The only indication that the owner is accessible by email shows up on only one page of the site, the contact page. Also frequent typos and misspellings occur on several pages.

Marketing

Like those of so many entrepreneurs and small business owners, this site appears to have been built without the owner having a clear marketing plan in mind. The Web copy delivers inconsistent messaging in several instances, and the USP (unique selling proposition) is missing. The single biggest area for improvement is sharpening benefit statements; there are features but no benefits. The owner doesn't make the point effectively that she's selling freedom from pain and hassles, providing an escape from wedding planning hassles, or that she's in the business of joy mongering.

Calls to action on each page are subtle, almost passive in nature. We recommend bolding and/or larger fonts. And where are testimonials from other satisfied brides? While we like the uncluttered look and feel of the site overall, the owner would be making better use of screen real estate by including several testimonials on secondary pages. The site does provide an opportunity to opt in to a possible mailing list by asking for contact information in exchange for a free report; at least we hope that is the purpose of collecting contact data.

On the plus side, the site is social media friendly, offering buttons to join the owner on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. For a complete marketing makeover for this site, the authors of Guerilla Marketing on the Internet offer the following advice: "The secret to growing business profitability lies in understanding and applying time-tested marketing concepts, developing a plan that effectively uses limited resources for maximum results, and combining the right marketing message with the best marketing media." (Levinson, Meyerson, & Scarborough, 2008, pp. 154-155). The book also offers a list of 175 guerilla marketing on the Internet weapons, (Figure 9-2) specifically created for small businesses like this one.

Content

There's no question that content plays a significant role in determining a site's effectiveness. Effective Website Design Principles makes the point that the popularity of sites has emerged because of the in-depth information available on the Internet. Consequently, they maintain, it is "very important to give content a special place in your website design… The more comprehensive and helpful content you are able to provide, the more likely you are to gain popularity among your customers." (QWS)

Virginia Montecino provides guidelines for Web site content in her article Web Design Principles Checklist (2009). The first is that the site content should match the site purpose. For Weddings by Alice the site's purpose is promoting the owner's wedding planning business; the site meets that design criteria. Where the site falls short is the Web copy itself.

The Web copy was not spellchecked. Our review found several misspellings, typos, overuse of capitalization as well as grammatical errors. Most users associate these types of errors with lacking attention to detail, which causes them to click away in search of another site with higher credibility and better customer service. If the site owner had access to traffic statistics for her site, she would probably find a high incidence of short duration visits.

Traffic

We have no visibility into traffic stats for this website, but we can make some educated guesses about current traffic and some suggestions on how to increase it. We easily found the website by typing the business name; however a Google search of wedding planners yielded over nine million hits before we narrowed the search geographically. Specifying the city in which the wedding planner is located still returned over three thousand hits. We recommend the site pursue an SEO strategy, starting with rewriting web copy to make it keyword-rich and search engine friendly. Also the site should subscribe to Google's free analytics program.

Summary

Our review of the Weddings by Alice website produced many instances where Web design best practices should be implemented. We then incorporated some of the proposed changes into a prototype home page and secondary page.

Reference List

Basic Web Design Principles, Retrieved on 3/25/2011 from http://www.umich.edu/~ece/resources/design.html

Coolen, J. (2009). 7 Key Principles That Make A Web Design Look Good. http://www.noupe.com/how-tos/7-key-principles-that-make-a-web-design-look-good.html

Designing an Effective Web Site. Retrieved on 3/25/2011 from http://www.websites.ac/websites/frameset.html?design_prin.html

Effective Website Design Principles, QWS. Retrieved on 3/25/2011 from http://www.quality-web-solutions.com/blog/effective-website-design-principles/

Friedman, V. 10 Principles of Effective Web Design. Smashing Magazine. Retrieved on 3/25/2011 from http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/31/10-principles-of-effective-web-design/

Gentile, T. 6 Web Design Principles to Get Visitors to Stay Longer. Retrieved on 3/25/2011 from http://www.taragentile.com/6-web-design-principles-to-get-visitors-to-stay-longer/

Hunt, B. 2006. Web 2.0 How-To Design Style Guide, Web Design from Scratch. Retrieved on 3/25/2011 from http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/web-design/web-2-0-design-style-guide/

Levinson, J., Meyerson, M. & Scarborough, M. 2008. Guerilla Marketing on the Internet. Canada: Entrepreneur Press.

Martin, S. Effective Visual Communication for Graphical User Interfaces. Retrieved on 3/25/2011 from http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/smartin/int_design.html

McClurg-Genevese, J. 2005. The Principles of Design. Digital Web Magazine http://www.digital-web.com/articles/principles_of_design/

Montecino, V. 2009. Web Design Principles Checklist, Education and Technology Resources, George Mason University, retrieved from http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/index.html

Scott, D.M. 2010. The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley and Sons.

Web Design Principles. U.S.-Webmasters.com. http://www.us-webmasters.com/web-design-principles/