Exercise 2: James DodsonThis is a featured page

Although the website for the 5 Safe Points Driving School is not that big, I felt lost while using it. There are too many links in such a small place on the homepage. In fact, links are the only means of navigation throughout the site. The red hyperlinks lead to other pages for this specific driving school; the blue links lead to other sites that might be useful to visitors, such as various websites for driver improvement programs in Virginia. I don’t know if I should consider these other programs competitors because I’m not sure how driver improvement programs work together. I guess they’re all affiliated with the DMV. Besides this simple color coding with the links, the homepage does not offer effective organization.

The links are too wordy. Every link that takes the user elsewhere in the site says “click here,” but there is no need to tell people that when it is perfectly clear that you click on the links. A much simpler label would be Virginia Driver Improvement
Classroom Schedule.” These links are right in the middle of the page, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a bit tedious reading “click here for this” in every link. If the statement is shortened to feature just the title of the next page, I feel that would be less irritating to users.

It was not until the third or fourth time I returned to the homepage did I realize that the two images also serve as hyperlinks. The images are horrible first of all. I guess a student sitting in a desk sort of pertains to a driver improvement class, but there are so many other more interesting pictures that could have been used. How about a crazed driver on one side and a relaxed driver on the other to serve as a before-and-after perspective? The happy, young people on the homepage show no indication that they are in a driver improvement class.

The rainbow colors are also visually irritating and provide nothing to the site. The layout for the site does not fit in my normal window, so I had to maximize the screen to see everything or scroll around (which I really did not feel like doing).

Everything that a potential user of this site would want to know is available, but the way it has been set-up makes it difficult to use. The more I looked at the pictures on the homepage, the more they bothered me. I finally figured out the one on the left is for classes taught in person, and the picture on the right is for online classes (duh); thus, the pictures are of a man sitting in a desk and a woman showing her computer screen. I guess there was more organization than I originally saw, but still…5 Safe Points Driving School shouldn’t make me work so hard to figure that out.


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Latest page update: made by Jedodson , Jun 23 2009, 2:00 PM EDT (about this update About This Update Jedodson paragraph separation - Jedodson


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