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.

Blog 6 - Jason Santa Maria

This site is great. I love how it's meant to look like a book and how easy it is to get around in. The way he has his photograph viewer set up is beautiful. It loads the images fast and looks classy. There's no ugly drop down menus, there's no horrible music, the colors are beautiful and the graphics are lovely. As a plus the copywriting is even interesting, I found myself reading his entire about! That's something that I usually start out reading, get bored and stop to go to another page. I love how every page in the site has the title on the top of it with the small black line under it, it's very consistent. I also love how the top title bar doesn't just say the name of the site on each page, but changes to represent each name. The watermark on the page in the top right corner is beautiful.

I can’t get over the fact that I really have nothing bad to say about this site. The linking is so simple anyone could use it. It seriously makes me want to start working a lot harder on my own site just to try to get as great of a page as he has. I think the only thing I was disappointed in was that his portfolio is down and I didn’t get to see any of his other work.

Bloc 5: Robots and Monkeys

I don't like this site. I somewhat know why but it's strange but my first impression of this site was pretty much: Yuck.

Part of it was that it starts with very repetitive music. I was tired of it right away and turned it off. I then clicked on the first link I saw, the chapter 1 of Runoff. I found something to do with a book, when I clicked on the first book, a new window opened that had words but broken images. So I was turned off from that page. I then used my back button to go to the original page and the music started again, turned that off again and saw the four links on the bottom. Already I was starting to form more opinion's on this site and it didn't look good for the site.

I clicked on portfolio and a new window came up with some nice looking stripes. I clicked and all that came up was this white thing with blue dots. So I assume I'm suppose to go over the dots. I guess I think portfolio links should be more obvious but besides for that, this section of the site is nice. I like the examples and only wish I could click on them to blow them up. From a usability standpoint I'm not sure why I can't, thumbnail looking images should be clickable so I can read the text and look at it closer.

Robots and Monkey Publishing takes me back to where I was when I clicked on Chapter 1, now I have to use the back button and I just know that music is going to start back up.

At any rate, I think I'm done, contact is just contact and although I don't exactly like this site I can see how it's a unique way of having a personal site and a different way of doing a portfolio.

I hadn't really paid attention to the circle thing. This is what officially killed the site for me. The pages the links went to were interesting, however I had to go back to the main page everytime to get to another one of these sections. Going to the main page meant that every single time I had to turn off the music again!

From a usability look, I think this site should have done a better job at linking pages to each other. The five from the circle should have all been linked. The images on the robotandmonkey publishing should have worked. Also, I think often music can be a bad choice for a site unless it's something like a movie site with a soundtrack or a band site or if they let you click no music once and that lead you to a different subpage, navigate the same way from there, that way whenever you click the back button you go to the page with no music. Just because you like some kind of music doesn't mean everyone will. The circle links could also stand out. I really liked the graphics though, they were well done and the color scheme was nice.

Blog 4: Tempus Flight

Why did people throw their clocks out the window?
They wanted to see time fly!
(I so love corny jokes so I did get interested in this site at first.)

Ummm, I am having a really hard time telling if I like this site or not. I like that it's creative. I like that since it is an art thing they with with more of an artsy type of feel. If their main purpose was to educate me some, they achieved it. If their main purpose was to talk me into wanting to buy the catalog, I don't think they achieved it at all.

The world view I liked. I liked the world map popping up and telling me about what sort of art was found there. I only liked this in Internet Explorer though, it didn't seem to want to work with Firefox which always somwhat gets to me.

I also liked that you can go to a classroom lesson type thing on every page. That's very useful, expecially since it appears they are going after an education audience.

I didn't like the graphics. I feel that if you are going to make an art site you should at least take the time to make sure all your graphics are optimized for whoever is looking at them and they should all be anti-aliased. I felt like they were insulting themselves by not having better graphics, especially when a lot of work had been done on the Flash design, I can't understand why they wouldn't have worked on the graphics for longer.

I think overall I liked this site, but I really, really, really want them to work on the graphics some and I think with a little more time this could have been a much better site.

Blog 3: juxtinteractive

JUXT Interactive

It's cool, it's hip, it's trendy, and personally I really don't like their site very much. The design is cool, it looks pretty neat and it looks like the sort of cool people you would want to have for your interactive marketing, I guess if you want your interactive marketing to just be games and that sort of thing, which completly could be the case and therefore it looks great.

However, there are just some simple things that aren't really usable about it. Maybe I'm a little slow, but I didn't even realize that the Clients/Projects section scrolled until my mouse happen to slip over the small little arrow on the right side of the box, which led me to find the box on the top scrolled too.

I guess for me it just doesn't really communicate the fact that they are suppose to be a professional design firm. There's not much to the site and I think it would look better with better colors, the contrast of just black and brown is a bit dark for me. I think they are doing a great thing with being different then just every business out ther who just makes a site that has standard buttons on top or side and a white background and such, but some of their stuff just needs to be changed.