Time: 12.39PM
Listening to : fan spinning
Where : Room
Ok...first thing first. MM students, please do update your blog on web project 2 progress. And also please post your review and research on navigation. Please do so before tomorrow morning.
Ok... I went through a few websites. Going to do an analysis for some of them. For now, I will post up 2 of the websites first.
AgencyNet Interactive
This is a design company official website. The sort of navigation here is a combination of Image Map, Bottom menu, Image Link, Side Menu and drag+drop style (besides clicking). Homepage will always have 2 types of button navigation. One is the Image Map (the top view of the office) and also the Bottom Menu. User can either click the bottom menu for easy access or they can explore the Image Map. The Image Map is really simple actually. If the room is clickable, the room will glow once and the bottom menu will move a little to show what page link it is.
In the portfolio page, there are also 2 types of button navigation. One is the side menu (on the left) and the other one the bottom menu. The bottom menu is consistent. No matter what page the user is at, the bottom navigation will always be there. So it is unlikely that the user will be lost. For the side menu, the links are to load in the screen area.
This is the culture page. As usual, the bottom navigation is there. And notice the remote control. It's another type of navigation. Although it functions to play and pause the movie, I find it interesting that the designer integrated the real remote control with the buttons. Most of the site that I explored usually just use the YouTube style, where the buttons are below the screen.
This is the news page. Actually when you clicked the link, it does not load this page because the page that will be loaded is in the digital form style. When you clicked the newspaper archive, they will show the news in a more traditional way; the newspaper. And to flip to the next page, user can click and drag the edge of the newspaper. There is another page that I did not screenshot, which is the client list. That page also utilizes the drag and drop navigation. Check out this page. Even though it's using flash, I think the navigation style for the buttons are interesting.UDirect NYC
This is also another design company. Also flash based but then again, it can be used in HTML also. This site also combines several type of navigation. For the main page, there are one type. The side navigation on the right. Notice the orange button. In this whole website, if the buttons are in orange, it means there are other sub buttons that are collapsed within the main one.
For example this one. When you rollover on the orange button, another list of links will appear. I don't know if this qualify as menu tree or not.
But anyway, just like the one at the top, in this page (studio), the orange button has sub-menu in it. But the "image" button is in grey. But when you click on it, you can choose which picture you want to view. For the grey buttons, you need to click on it to see extra option.
For this page, it resembles the traditional drop down menu but for this site, when you clicked on the spots link, the drop down menu style will be in flash form but it will not collapse back up until you click another main link.
The last type of navigation style that I could find is the thumbnail link. When you click on the image, the picture will enlarge and user can read the info on it.That will be the end of the my first review. I think the web designer arranged the content and planned the navigation well. Even though there are many types of navigation style used in one page, it does not look cluttered neither did it confused the user.
Now for assignment updates.
Visual Fund2
4 figs
Haunted House
Typo
Presentation for project2
WebDesign1
Show progress in digital form
Research and analysis on navigation
Update your blog on project2 progress
DesignMethod2
Research on your chosen topic
DigitalMedia2
Prototype
That's all for now.
-chen-
[1.21PM]
Labels: Assignment Updates, web analysis, Web Design 1
