It236 Week9 Final Essays

It236 Week9 Final Essays It236 Week9 Final Essay It236 Week9 Final Essay Week 9 Final Ken Kronemeyer Ken Kronemeyer University of Phoenix, Axia College IT236 [ November 21, 2010 ] Kevin Jayne Week 9 Final Ken Kronemeyer The Assignment: 1. Final Project: Web Site Analysis * Analyze the Web site you selected for the Capstone Discussion question. * Use on your knowledge gained from the past 9 weeks. * Evaluate the current design of the site. * Identify recommendations for redesign. The Site The web site chosen for this project is the Belleville News-Democrat Newspaper web site from Belleville, Illinois. It is the hometown newspaper of this papers author. The site URL is bnd. com/ . It’s Problems 1. The first thing that happens when you enter this site is a pop-up. As a viewer of many websites, I have found this to be a real turn-off to continuing visits to a web site, as it is not very welcoming and is a distraction to the purpose of my visit. 2. News/Sports/Life/Opinions Page: Confusing hodgepodge of boxes and information and that is the same template on all major pages. (Fig. 1) 3. What would normally be the classifieds section of a newspaper is replaced with outsourced functions. For instance the Auto’s section is sourced to Cars. om instead of the actual newspaper ads, the Jobs section is sourced to CareerBuilder. com etc. (Fig 2) 4. The only real page that is uncluttered and straightforward is the â€Å"Services† page which is all about the services provided by the newspaper – payment, subscriptions etc. (Fig3) 5. Navigation is straightforward if one does not stray from the Navigation Bar at the top or goes all the way to the bottom of the screen to the sitemap. (Fig 4) 6. None of the newspapers special features are available either such as the Sunday Parade Magazine or even the daily comics. Nor are the sale ad inserts that many could use. If one wants the inserts, one has to buy the print edition. Fig 1| Fig 2| Fig 3| Fig 4 Recommendations Ideally, for a newspaper format, where the news and local interests are the main topics, this site should move all the ads to a column on the right and out of the body of the page, that way if one wants to view the ads, they are readily available for viewing and easily accessible devoting the main body of the page to what the site is about – news. Secondly, there should be some way for readers to access the actual classifieds of the newspaper. As it is, ads that are in the subscriber/newsrack edition are not available on line in the outsourced ad boxes. Many jobs I the paper edition are not in the CareerBuilder. com site and may automobiles listed in the paper edition are not in the Cars. com site, and it is the same for any of the other ads. This could be a great local news site, if the pressure for revenue did not interfere with the web sites design. Conclusion This could be a great site if it was de-cluttered and not made so distracting to the visitor and the pop-ups were done away with. If the site also included everything that comes with the daily print edition Comics, ad inserts, this would be a really useful and faithful representation of this fine newspaper. References Figs 1-4, Belleville News-Democrat, 2010, Retrieved November, 2010 from bnd. com/