Website Analysis

https://www.apple.com/ (link)

www.apple.com/iphone/

www.apple.com/ipod/

store.apple.com/ca/

​Content

The Apple site's content consists mainly of Apple's news, products, and support for their products. The purposes of the site are to advertise Apple's products, give support to their customers, and provide a place where customers can purchase Apple products online. The site's target audience is new and existing apple customers of any age, gender, race or background. The site has a lot of flashy graphics, but they are well placed and not overwhelming. The site also has a lot of useful information on their products, like features, requirements and specifications. A lot of the sites content is biased, glorifying apple products, but a good portion of it is also informative, honest and useful. The site makes effective use of headers, subheaders and captions. They are logical, descriptive and consistent. I would describe the site as graphic heavy, but that's only because the graphics that are in place are very large and prominent. The way these graphics are integrated is very well thought out, and overall the site is very well balanced. Text content is still easily found and accessed. The graphical and interactive content is informative as well as being appealing to the eye. The site has slideshows and flash videos that can be watched. The content is up to date and relevant. Older content is not archived, but that wouldn't really be appropriate for this type of site anyway. The things that I find most appealing about this site as far as content goes are that the simplest and most straight forward content is most prominent, however technical and more detailed content is still available and easily found for those who are actually interested in seeing it.

Design

The apple site is very attractive and appealing to the eye. It appears simple, and is very intuitive to navigate. It is well balanced, not crowded or empty feeling. The design is not linear, it appears to make good use of CSS and other tools to create an interesting layout. Important text is large and easily read. The colours that are used the most are white and various shades of grey. Text is usually black or a shade of grey unless the background is darker, in which case it is sometimes white. Links are blue. The font choice is very sleek and easily read. Contrast between fonts and backgrounds is existent and consistent. Site layout, colours, and overall appearance is also consistent. Some elements move, but most stay the same. For example, switching between the store and iphone pages shows a very different layout in the body, but the feeling of the pages, colour scheme remains consistent. The navigation system stays consistent and intuitive throughout all pages. The site does not require any horizontal scrolling on any reasonably sized resolution. Vertical scrolling is existent, but not extreme. You won't find yourself scrolling down for an extended period of time to find what you are looking for.

• Analyze the various navigation systems within the site:
  • What navigation systems or methods are used and where are they located? (Menu bars, drop-down menus, hypertext links throughout the document, icons, photos or graphics, lists of links)
  • Does the home page establish the basic navigation methods? And are the navigation methods consistent and in similar locations throughout the site?
  • Discuss the ease with which viewer can find and navigate to specific content.
  • Is the site too deep? (Too many clicks to get to the desired information)
  • Are places viewers are to click obvious? Or is navigation a mystery? Can viewer easily identify which text or graphics are clickable?
  • Does the site let you leave when you click the BACK button? Some sites keep hanging onto you and stopping you at their home page when you click the back button, or they redirect the viewer to another site or trap visitors in a endless loop of popup windows.
  • Is a "Home" icon, button or link present in the same position on every page in the site?
  • Is mouseover used to indicate which navigation button you select?
  • What type of hyper-links are used:  internal (to pages within the site), external (to other websites), and relative links (to different parts or sections within a single longer page)?
• The site may or may not recognize you when you come back, but it does not show you either way. The site is not customizable by users, but I do not believe this would be a good idea anyway. The site includes a site map and search bar.

Technical

The URL (https://www.apple.com/) is relevant to the site's content (Apple's products, support, and information). Loading times can sometimes be a few seconds, which is more than typically wanted, but the site makes up for it by delivering a lot of great and well organized content once it does load. The navigation bar loads first which is good because it can save you time if you know where you're going. Pages have appropriate names which are related to their content. The site is professionally edited and has no obvious grammatical or spelling mistakes. There are no broken links or missing pages. The site is very easy to find using search engines.

https://www.polycount.com/ (link)

www.polycount.com 

www.polycount.com/forum/

wiki.polycount.com

​Content

• Provide a detailed overview or summary of the content of the site.
• Identify the specific purpose(s) of the site (educating users, providing news, corporate image branding, supporting existing customers, gathering information, auction site, banking, government, political, social issue promotion, community site for those with similar interest, club/organization, mall, subscription service, e-commerce, investor relations, distribute products or service literature, customer service, host online courses, search engine, bookstore, internet provider, portfolio of artwork, etc.). 
• Identify the target audience or market.
• Is the site "oozing" with great content for their target audience that will draw the visitors like ants to a picnic? Or does it include very little information and just provide users with a lot of pretty pictures, fun distractions, and / or a bunch of links to other sites?
• Is the content full of information that is useful, helpful, relevant, and interesting? Or is it useless and trivial?
• Is there effective use of headers, subheaders, and captions? Are they descriptive?
• Does the site include multimedia elements? Or does it rely solely on text and graphics? Is there a balance between text, graphic, and multimedia elements? Or is the site text or graphic heavy? 
• Is all of the content relevant to the site or does it distract the user from the real purpose (i.e. games and animation that act as fluff pieces that entertain rather than add meat to the content, animations and graphics are unrelated to the content)
• What is the level of interactivity? Are there links, videos to watch, music or sound to listen to? Forms or surveys to complete? Forums or Blogs to participate in? Social networking components?
• To what extent is the site is updated regularly - Is the date of the most recent update provided?
• Is older content archived?
• Is a "What's New" type section provided? (list of recent updates)
• What qualities make the viewer likely or unlikely to revisit the site at a later date - Does the site leave you or anyone wanting to come back again?

Design

• Discuss the visual appeal or attractiveness.
• Discuss the organization or placement of various elements.
  • Is there simplicity or complexity of design? 
  • Is the site overcrowded or too empty?
  • Is the organization logical, or are content elements thrown randomly all over the place?
  • Is the design linear (all vertical down the page), or does the designer make use of tables, forms, CSS, and / or text-wrap to make the layout more complex?
• What is the readability factor?
• Analyze the use of color, backgrounds, and font choices (face, style, size).
• Does the site have a consistent feel and appearance or does it feel piecemeal constructed? Be sure to discuss the consistency or repetition of design elements throughout a page and throughout multiple pages of the site. 
• Discuss the length and width of pages and the scrolling factor - Does the site require you to move a slider to the right to view the full width of the screen? Does it require extensive vertical scrolling?
• Analyze the various navigation systems within the site:
  • What navigation systems or methods are used and where are they located? (Menu bars, drop-down menus, hypertext links throughout the document, icons, photos or graphics, lists of links)
  • Does the home page establish the basic navigation methods? And are the navigation methods consistent and in similar locations throughout the site?
  • Discuss the ease with which viewer can find and navigate to specific content.
  • Is the site too deep? (Too many clicks to get to the desired information)
  • Are places viewers are to click obvious? Or is navigation a mystery? Can viewer easily identify which text or graphics are clickable?
  • Does the site let you leave when you click the BACK button? Some sites keep hanging onto you and stopping you at their home page when you click the back button, or they redirect the viewer to another site or trap visitors in a endless loop of popup windows.
  • Is a "Home" icon, button or link present in the same position on every page in the site?
  • Is mouseover used to indicate which navigation button you select?
  • What type of hyper-links are used:  internal (to pages within the site), external (to other websites), and relative links (to different parts or sections within a single longer page)?
• Does the site personally recognize you when you come back? Does it tell you that it does?
• Is the site customizable by individual viewers (font choice and size, color scheme, layout)?
• Is there a splash screen or welcome screen that introduces viewer to the site? Is it effective?
• Does the site include a "Site Map" page?
• Is there a search feature?

Technical