Website Analysis - Safm Australia

Surfing the net can be a difficult and pain-staking task; this can be made even harder when the web designer designs the site poorly and hard to navigate. Websites are there for a people's information and whether it is appealing to the eye or not will determine if a person wants to use that particular site. The web has a variety of styles, shapes and colours that can be placed within the design chosen to create a sense of what the true meaning of the site is. As there are too many different designs and layouts for websites to name; one website that has been found not to be pleasing to the eye would have to be the SAFM website . Now this site is to promote the radio station SAFM and also promoting the radio MC's for the duration that the radio is online.

The home page is the spot in which is to be pleasing to the eye and wants to attract the reader or viewer to want to delve further within the site in a more thorough manner; however, this home page is terrible in the sense that there is far too much clutter on the page. This makes it very difficult for the users of these pages to get an understanding of where they are meant to be reading and where to start on the page. This then confuses the viewer and they are less likely to stay on the website and find other sources for their information or not bother with the topic altogether.

Now in an article or web design the eyes of a viewer is most likely going to be attracted to look at the images first, however this is not always the case when big and bold headings are easily seen as the place to start therefore can make it difficult to discover where the beginning and where to head to next. It becomes a conflicting issue that by having too much information, people are not going to want to continue looking at the site.

Something else that distracts a reader's eye is having lots of advertisements all over the page; it distracts the onlooker and creates an unnecessary uncomfortable feeling to the page. Too many advertisements clutter the page and make it look untidy and not appealing to the eye. Having a web design that is full of advertisements distances the reader from the page and therefore the term less is more comes in to action. This means that by having less content on the page does not mean that there is less information evident on it, but however allows the viewer to get straight to what it is that they may be searching for.

So the saying less is more really means what it says. There have been surveys on the idea of cluttered sites and uncluttered sites; this shows that the survey of about four thousand web users saying that the cluttering of a site diminishes the effectiveness of advertisements and actually annoys the audience. This survey also said that this created a poor performance and had a lower chance of people looking at the ads or even going to a website. This relates well to the SAFM website in the way that it has far too many advertisements and making it unpleasing to the eye.

SAFM is poorly designed as it does not attempt to really show you what the site is about. It takes them till near the bottom of the page to show some signs of what SAFM does, for an example the gotcha calls that they do on the radio. This is something that is of high importance to the radio show, yet the site designers have put it near the end. This is not good for the promotion of the radio station; it distracts the eyes of the viewer and sometimes