College has it Right!

The beginning of senior year is mainly looking at the colleges that interest you. Since everything is based on the internet now-a-days the first thing you usually do while looking for a college is by looking at the websites. While going through all the different websites you find the “good” and “bad” ones. When I was preparing for college there was one website that helped me out a lot. College Board had everything that I needed right when I needed it. On the website it had a section for students, parents, and professionals. Since I am a student I only could access the student section. Once you sign into “For Students” there is sections for College Board Tests, Plan for College, Find a College, Apply to College, and Pay for College. When you click on “College Board Tests” it has information about the SAT & Subject Tests, PSAT/NMSQT, AP, and CLEP. There is a section called “Tools” which has everything you need to know and have to take the College Board tests. You can learn, register, practice/prepare, scores, and contact each of them. I like this because there are several tools to help you be successful in the College Board tests. When you click on “Plan for College” all different type of links come up to help you start planning for college. There is everything from starting points all the way up to college success. After you are done planning for college you click on “Find a College” and it has a tool that is called, “College Match Maker” which I personally think is the best and most helpful thing on the website. What you do is answer all the questions such as, what size school, where, what type of area you want, and what majors you are looking at. After doing that a bunch of colleges that match you will come up, from there you can look at the school, what they require, and how much it is. Then, after you find schools you should click on “Apply to College”. The major problem that the most seniors have is writing their college essay. Most students don’t know what to write about, how long to write it, or what the college is even looking for in the essay, so College Board has a whole section on everything you need to know about the college essays. Also, they talk about the applications, when to send them in and what you need to send into the college with the applications. Once you apply to college you need to know how to pay for it, so that is when you should click on “Pay for College”. This tells you everything you need to know about paying for college. There is a section for scholarships and financial aid, a section on all the different ways to pay for college, and even a section with a net price calculator. I think that College Board is a great tool for High School juniors and seniors to learn everything they need to know about college.

When I look at good websites I don’t see a bunch of different colors and words on the home page. When I look at Evolution and Natural Science I see boxes all different colors each with a lot of words in them. The home page is wicked long, which I think you should only have to scroll down a little bit, but have links to other pages that say everything that it says in the boxes. Every box has different types of font, which I believe it should be only one or two different fonts. If I was someone looking for information about evolution and natural science and I clicked on this page, I would click the back button right away because this website is way too busy, with all the different colors, fonts, and is very confusing. There are a few links, when you click on them it is even more confusing and difficult. The background color is very ugly too. I also found a couple of spelling errors, which isn’t good. Overall, I believe that this website is not a good website at all.

Website Complexity

There are many different types of website in the world today. Some are complex and others purely simple. Complex websites may be harder to read and navigate through. Whereas the simple websites may be easier to read through and navigate. When you use a website you use it with the confidence that it will be convenient and easy enough to read and navigate.

I have found two websites that demonstrate these two characteristics. Aeropostale is a very easy to use website. Everything is neatly setup for your convenience. So navigation is not a hassle. It also has everything neatly displayed so that you see exactly what you want. H&M’s website is very complex and hard to use. They don’t display in a neat and organized manner. As well as very hard to navigate through. You never know what is coming up. The links below will navigate you to these two very different websites.

Aeropostale
H&M

Bad vs. Good

Bad:

http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/

This is labeled as a bad website because of how the title is animated and that you can barely read it on the website. There are many flaws to the website with the background being too busy for the person to concentrate on what’s on the website itself. There are way too many animations for this website. There are way too many advertisements that are not useful for this website.

Good:

http://www.yahoo.com/

This is labeled as a good website because everything is placed evenly. It is also the same font size except the important things that they want to advertise. Yahoo used their white space up evenly and didn’t putt useless stuff in just to fill space. They have everything in the right places and they show consistency in their way of creating this website. All the links are evenly distributed and are working right. There are more words because it’s like a news website and there are some picture’s for the understanding of the words.

Website Readability

One website that I feel that shows examples of easy-to-read text would be my uncle’s website click here to view for yourself, Sol Yoga. I think that there are pictures placed in appropriate places along with text to follow. This is a well rounded and put together website about his yoga company. There are links at the top of the page that can take you to eleven different pages, which keep you informed about Sol Yoga. On his website he even has picture links to keep his company socially connected to websites like FaceBook Twitter and Yelp. I also feel like the color schemes are well chosen and well put together it’s not to over whelming for the eye.

I also came across a website that I felt does not show examples of easy-to-read text it’s a website about Evangel Cathedral. I think that this website is really overwhelming to the eye, everything is moving around and hard to focus on what you’re trying to look at and read. When you click the links on the left side once you enter the website it takes a minute to actually open the links I also feel that this website is not suitable for the general topic of the actual website.