Creating Websites

Creating Websites

The URL http://www.volunteerfairfax.org  is user friendly since it is shorter than three levels deep, it does not contain hyphens, underscores and lengthy versions of words. The URL is in lowercase, it is in plain language. The URL is self correcting and convectional because there is nothing special about it to remember other than the domain name.

The purpose of the site is obvious. The scope of the site depends on the purpose and content in the website. The scope of this website is XL, for it contains at least 15 pages, 1 contact form and html programming. So the price will be about $1399

The site’s main audience are volunteers; this is evident from the website name to the main content of the website, which is addressed to volunteers. The website is modern looking; this is so because the navigational menus’ are done In JavaScript and are dropdown. The design of the website and the logo all suggest a modern website.

The navigation of the website is easy; because of the use of cascading and dropdown menus where, those things that relate fall under the same menu. For example

Individual Volunteers >>>> Just For Youth >>> Getting Started.

The disadvantage of this method is that, one may take a little more time before they get what they wan, if the have no idea under what menu does it fall.

For compatibility, the website is not very good on different browsers when on Internet explorer, the dropdown menus are functional but when on Opera and Firefox the menus are not active. The number of images used on the website its okay. Although gif format for the images would have been used instead of jpeg, for gif file sizes are usually smaller. The images used are not a very good idea for someone using dial up connection, since for this page to display will be a little slow due to the size of the images to be downloaded. The site also contains animations and they do slow down the loading speed of the website, which is not desirable.

When JavaScript is turned off, there are errors that occur; the navigational menus are no longer accessible since they have been created in JavaScript. This affected my visit to the website since navigation was almost impossible.

Recommendation for the website would be to fix the menu bug on Opera and Firefox browsers, redo the layout structure of the website using CSS and DIV tags and do away with the tables for they slow down the loading time. If it is necessary to use animations, use JavaScript to animate and have the images to be animated optimized for web and in gif format.