Web site analysis

The website of ‘The Friends of The Queen Elizabeth Hospital (TQEH)’ is a secondary page of TQEH’s website. As a non-profit organization, the purpose of the Friends of TQEH’s site is to attract more volunteers aged 30 or 40 years to this organization. Although this site is easy to navigate, some problems of the presentation and organization of the information should be addressed. That is, the site is simple, but lack of visual design. The information is not organized well which decreases usability and some accessibility problems should be addressed as well.

Visual design is one of the important factors in the success of web site design which refers to the colour, font and page layout. ‘The theme will be expressed in the content: the words, images, and overall appearance’ (Farkas &Farkas, 2002). According to Sklar (2003, pp.31), designer should ‘plan the unifying themes and structure that will hold the pages together.’ The theme of this site is hard to know which means it is hard for users to know the impression this organization wants to convey. The current website doesn't have the organization’s logo and the layout is lack of characteristic. Although the website is unified by using same font, colour and layout, the theme of the site is still not created. Blue is used as the main colour of the website which is hard to represent the theme of friendly and warm. The site should use more happy and warm colours to represent its theme. The logo should be placed in the site in a reasonable size and noticeable location which can make users easily to recognize what this website is. ‘It should be larger and more prominent than the items around it so it gets first attention when users enter the site’ (Nielsen &Tahir, 2002).  Also, it is hard to recognize the name of the Friends of TQEH. The size of the name is too small and can not get the first attention. Moreover, on this site, almost all elements are left alignment which reduces visual interest. The contrast between the headlines and body text is not significant on this site.

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Reference:

Sklar, J 2003, 'Web site design principles', in Principles of web design, Course Technology, a division of Thomson Learning, Cambridge, MA.

Farkas, DK & Farkas, JB 2002, Principles of web design, Joseph Opiela,  Pearson Education.Inc.