Market Research - Site 2 - Focus Web Design

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Focus Web Design is a Web Design company (no surprise!).

Visual Style
I particularly like the navigation icons with names underneath. The icons act as conventions, whilst the text label ensures that users aren't bewildered by MMN.

Functionality
I like that the navigation links are neatly grouped into drop-down menus.

Critique!

• Verbosity
• Errors - eg. In the navigation menu, the rollover image for "Support" is unfortunately replaced by the "Services" rollover image.
• Spelling errors - eg. In the navigation menu, under "about us", the word "guarantees" is misspelt as "guarentees". This is a very important word to potential clients, and should never be misspelt (you can lose credibility). I personally gaurintee that I will never misspell it.
• There are no previews on the portfolio page. A small preview allows potential clients to quickly assess your previous work before committing to click the link.
  

Market Research - Site 1 - NetDogz

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NetDogz is a Web Services site.

Visual Style
It's visual content is generally well arranged. It makes good use of colour and contrast, whilst keeping hypertext links easily discernible from other text and images. Overall it is quite visually appealing to me.

Functionality
This site has some of the functionality I would like to incorporate into my final design. It has simple, straight-forward navigation. Also, it makes good use of Flash on the home page for navigation links and site logo. Notably, the website is NOT dependant on the Flash plugin.

Critique!
There are a few things I dislike about this site.

• Verbosity. There is simply too much information and "happy talk" on most of the pages.
  
• White-space. Not enough of it!
• The portfolio page could possibly be simplified and reduced from 3 pages.
• Information is repeated on the "about us" and "contact us" pages. It is unnecessary. A link to the contact page could easily replace the repeated information on the "about us" page.
  

My Proposed Website

I know that a few people already have a very similar idea. My idea is a portfolio/showcase Website for design skills. It would provide potential customers with my contact details and examples of my site designing ability. The site would be entitled something like:

Anthony Phillips - Web Designer

Specialising in Websites that people love to use.

I have never done a site promoting myself as a designer, but I am getting to the stage that I think I am ready to do one. I would probably need to convince my target audience that usability is more important than feature-rich design in terms of end-users experience.

Top Ten Things I Hate About the Web

10. Small font sizes that can't be adjusted. Thats just poor design.
9. Splash Screens - I just don't like them.
8. Websites that use PDFs for information that should be in HTML - Annoying wait while the PDF loads, harder to search, PDFs seem to crash my browser occasionally.
7. Spam emails - I don't need to buy viagra, OEM software or body part enlargements. If I did, I would find them myself.
6. Colour schemes - Too bright, not enough contrast or colours that don't fit together.
5. Popups - Congratulations you have won a laptop (fineprint: first you must complete these 22 sponsor offers, some of which are free, most of which cost more than the laptop).
4. Maintenance issues - Websites that always seem to be "under construction" or "under repair". Just make it work!
3. 404 Page not found! - The most accessed page on the Internet (don't quote me, i'm just making a point).
2. Overloaded servers - Slow connection leading to slow page loading and timeouts.
1. Web standards that are supposed to be adopted by developers, but they only work in 1% of users' browsers (again, don't quote me).

Things I love about the Web (no top 10 this time):
Makes so many aspects of life so much easier. An example is shopping for obscure items or products that are only available in another country. I am a big NHL (ice hockey) fan, and the majority of NHL merchandise just isn't available in Australia.
Find answers to everyday questions so easily. I use this to prove my friends wrong all the time. I also use it to find useless info that I can slip into conversations to make myself sound smarter (eg. did you know that sound travels 15 times faster through steel than it travels through air? wow, you are smart anthony!).