Bonus Blog 2 - Fish Marketing

Wow, I really can’t explain this but I really like this site. It’s simple, it’s to the point and it entertains me. I like the link up top with the freshness guaranteed that then turns to a dead fish to a fried fish. Their point is suppose to be working on a smaller budget and without the million page website, I think it helps make their point. It says who they are, gives examples and gives a contact, really all a marketing site needs.

The only unclear part was that if you click on the stars it brings you to the top of the page. I didn’t know this until I just happened to hover over it. Really though, it’s not a very long site to scroll down.

I like the color scheme and the look of a cutting board. It seems like these guys are pretty cool and would be a good creative marketing agency to go with. The only amazing and somewhat contradictory part was that some of their portfolio included some pretty big names, like Cadillac for instance, which doesn’t convince me that they are a small time agency.

Bonus Blog 1 - Firewheel Design

For the most part I really like this site. It’s simple and to the point and used a very colorful color scheme for the design.

The only really confusing part I ran into was on the home page I had started to navigate the site with the links on the left side, when I went to a page they went away and I had to start using the top links instead. It would be better I think to not have the links on the lefts side at all on any page.

The Sparkplug page is very interesting. It seems nice for a design firm to have a type of blog running along with a blogroll along the side of it. It’s a nice addition for a design company since people are interested in such things.

I wish that when you click on view project you could have the ability to see the entire work instead of just a write up and a type of thumbnail.

The only other thing is that the title bar does not change while you navigate the site. This would be something easy to do and an extra signal to tell users where they are on the site.

Overall though, this is a pretty nice site. It’s not exactly anything that would be extremely memorable but it does get the job done and goes a little bit beyond.

Blog 7 - Weightshift

Weightshift seems very confusing at first. There's so many places to go that I'm not sure what is the most important place or what I'm even really looking at. From info and news I found out this was a design studio, it cleared up a lot of questions and it's something I think he should put on the first home page. I also think that the copy in info and news should either use we or I and not a combination of them both, I currently can't exactly decide if this is a one person show or more.

If the Info and News page was the first page you came to, I think this would be a great site. After reading it I would look at the portfolio and then might look more around the site, but the current homepage is too confusing, everything has almost equal real estate and with the brown colors nothing sticks out.

I do like the colors and I do like the way that the portfolio is done. It's very clean and very easy to see what has been done. It does take away some that he didn't group the company's projects and make them full projects instead of just listing them each separately, even though I can understand this was done for reasons of it making it look like he's done more.

Overall, this is a nice site. I would rearrange the work some and just cut out what he has as the homepage now and that's about it.