Palmquist - site analysis

1.) http://www.studybass.com/ (well organized)

2.) http://www.cracked.com/ (could use work)


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1.) StudyBass.com is a tutorial site for beginner bass lessons. Since it serves an audience that is most likely unfamiliar with an/the instrument, and also may be (young and) inexperienced with the internet itself, a fairly simple and easy-to-navigate design format is used throughout the site. Each page looks largely the same, and follows an almost identical design. Main links and links to other lesson guides are present on each page, while the relevant information is located right in the middle of each page, with some peripheries to each side. The only thing to watch for is in a given lesson, a user can choose whether to look at the lesson itself, and exercise, a quiz, and exemplary songs by using respective tabs at the top of the lesson under the title. The tabs aren't very big or emphasized, so a casual user can overlook them.


2.) Cracked.com is a comedy website with a host of contributors and fans submitting and commenting on humorous articles, images, videos, and the like. While there is are article archives (in reverse chronological order, as well as a popular and greatest hits list), author archives, and an interactive "category" list of recent articles, the design layout of the homepage looks unplanned, and while there are plenty of good ideas to help the user, they are too scattered to different corners of the page to be ideally effective. That isn't to say that the site is unnavigable--it is--but the casual user may have to fumble their way through the site to find something they are looking for or are interested in, especially as compared to a site with a simpler and more effective design, such as StudyBass.com.