Website Research

Having a website as well as a blog is a good way of getting your work out there and a well planned and thought out website will ensure the user finds it easy to navigate around your site without getting lost or worse bored. I don’t yet have a website as I want to make sure I have everything planned out just the way I want it before I go about designing it. I’ve browsed through many websites over the years and one thing that really annoys me when I reach someone’s page is when there’s too much going on and the page takes too long to load everything up. This is when I normally hit the close window button and go somewhere else. The sad thing is I probably missed out on something really good because of my impatience, but I’m guessing many other people will act in the same way as me.

One thing I like a website to have is an introduction page before you enter the site with buttons to navigate to different areas of interest. The McBess website is a brilliant example of this as it has buttons to direct you to his blog, main website, shop and his bands music. I like how the icons change as you hover over them and this is an aspect I’d like to have on my site. 

Another example of a neat and well organised website can be found here. I like how Neil has a nice crisp stylized look and feel to his site and how he has made it easy for people to navigate through his pages. He has a really nice portfolio page where it gives you info on the image as you hover over it. The image loads up at the bottom of the page instead of opening a new window so there's not the problem of having to try and navigate back to the page you were on previously.

I also found a nice website done by Simon Spilsbury. It has a really smooth animated opening page which then opens to the main page revealing his illustrations as thumbnails. When you click on a thumbnail it slides onto the page from the right and there are really smooth scrolling pop up menus at the bottom to navigate back to the main page or other pages of interest.

Edwina White has a really interesting page with some nice animated elements of her work that instantly give you an idea of what her style is all about. Each category has a different illustrated animation assigned to it that brings her work to life. My only criticism of the site is there are a lot of additional pages to navigate through once you choose a category to look at and they tend to load a little jerkily.

Here is an example of a website I’m not keen on. Although it has a nicely illustrated opening page there is nothing to say who they are and where to click to enter the site. I clicked on the main image and was greeted with a quite dull and unorganised page with loads of little circles that need to be clicked on to find out what the image is. They have categorised each section into posters, covers and a category called stuff which appears to be t-shirt designs and posters, but to be honest I was bored after a couple of clicks and gave up.


So I guess for my website I would like to have an interesting intro page with animated icons to guide people to different sections of my site and a nicely organized portfolio page with smooth opening images that don’t open a new window or get you lost. I would also like to be able to guide people to my blog, shop and twitter page so they can see what I'm getting up to and be able to contact me. Ha ha I don't want much!