Reaction to Guest Speaker Matthew Marco

After listening to Mr. Matthew Marco when he spoke to our class over Skype, it became apparent that certain features and elements make a website not only more functional and navigable but also more beneficial to its users. In his talk he emphasized simplicity (referencing websites such as the Apple Homepage), something that I’ve found to be extremely helpful when searching the web. He also mentioned a lot about how a website really has to focus on menu design as it’s the main focus of most websites. Simplicity and a great menu - those are the elements of an ‘easy to navigate’ website.

The first site I chose to analyze was a website for a business called Fast Company - a innovative and creative business media outlet. The menu and the site's navigation are fairly simple to use - as long as you actually find it on the page. (It's hidden in the upper left corner, but you almost miss it because it just looks like their logo.)

Upon clicking the menu button, any user would find that the site is divided into four main sections (design, exist, create and video) and upon exploration each of these sections are almost identical in layout. This is beneficial to the site's navigation as once the user explores just one of these sections they basically understand the navigation for the whole site.

The Second Site I chose to analyze was a media website called Media Matters For America, which is a news site dedicated to what looks like political news. Their menu bar does not seem to change from page to page - making it somewhat easy to navigate. It's easy to navigate, however everything on the website seems to be scrunched together. Making it hard to distinguish between the various options on the page. Out of the two sites I analyzed, this seems to be the worse of the two.

#design #marco