Online newspaper/magazine

website reviewed: "Femail Magazine" http://www.femail.com.au/

• This site doesn’t immediately scream “we are all about good design.” In fact, at first glance, it seems to be boring and cluttered with too much information. However, it has a very standard layout – bold header at the top, navigation bar directly below/inside it, content in three sections at below this, and footer at the bottom.
• The simple colour scheme (red and white) seems to have been used relatively well – it distinguishes the header and footer (which are a bold red) from the content (which is white). All headings are in red and other information is black, so the different sections stand out.
• The logo is on the left-hand side of the header(as is also standard). This isn’t very well designed – it seems cheap and rather unflattering. The text in the logo is large and bold, so it does a good job of grabbing attention, but the image part of it seems to shrink back into the deep red of the header. To the right of the logo is a search bar and two menus – one on top and one below it. While these also somewhat clutter the header and seem to be quite randomly positioned and uneven, they immediately provide the user with access to specific pages. The search bar is a good addition here though, since it really stands out against the red. If it had been placed below the header, one might have had to search for it. However, its positioning also seems very random and uneven. The worst part of the header are two yellow buttons on the right side which read “join our VIP club” and “enter competitions”. These are really ugly, not just in terms of positioning, but in terms of colour.
• The content area has an absolute information overload, which further gives the site an unsophisticated feel. This space is divided into three vertical sections. Again, these seem random and uneven, and are divided with dots (…..). This is quite ugly, but at the same time, it seems to divide the sections in a very subtle way. The left section is dedicated to random-links/menu – but this is not very clear and looks messy. For some reason, the login has been placed quite far down the page – it would have made more sense for this to be at the very top so that viewers don’t have to search for it, but can see it straight away.
• At the middle/ section are google adds, which firstly look really ugly, but also could confuse the user, especially if they are new to the site. Below this is the main content – articles with bold red headings (this is good – it highlights what each section is about), an image and text, with links to allow the user to read more. This allows the user to get an immediate sense of what the site has to offer in terms of current news and articles. The viewer can take in a lot of information quickly before deciding where they want to go next.
• The right section of the content area is reserved for flashing, moving adds. This is probably fair enough, considering that magazines are very much about advertising, but it doesn’t do a lot for the design of the site. These attract a lot of attention (again, I know that this is the point), and therefore take away attention from the actual content of the site.
• Navigation can be done by either using the search bar which is positioned inside the header, or by clicking on the horizontal menu buttons at the bottom of this, or by clicking on one of many (possibly too many) links in the content area. This offers users a lot of flexibility, but can also seem overwhelming. However, navigating back to the home page is always easy as there is a button for this.
• With a site that has this much information in it – especially in terms of adds, one can easily get lost when looking through the information. You go from reading one article to another, to another and if you wanted to eventually go back to the first or second article, you can’t – there is no back button on the page, and no way to really track where you have been.
• Overall, this site isn’t great. It is very confusing and busy and has been designed rather badly. It doesn’t have many strong points. I only really like how the search bar is in the header, so it is very easy to find, but even this hasn’t been done very well.