Main

 
Critique of City Web Page
Critique of A
City's New Web Page 		Gerard Bowles
©1998

I was recently asked to critique a city's new, introductory Web page design. The page was designed by an well-known advertising agency, with outside technical assistance from a Web page developer. The critique was in confidence, so I will not give the page. I have provided a rendering of the design layout so the city won't be recognized.

There were serious problems.


The page opened quickly due to it's HTML-only construction. That was smart, the pic had been well-compressed, and the page contained no unnecessary Perl, Java or CGI scripts.

The first thing the viewer sees is a large pic in the top center of the page, originally a photograph, heavily modified in Photoshop in an attempt to make it appear as an illustration. The composition of the original photo lacked marketing savvy--It made the middle-size city look like a tiny village.

The modification was worse, the colors were very distorted, buildings were pink outlines, trees were blue. It looked like something a dog might have regurgitated--and that is being kind. The color combinations were hideous, and clashed with other colors. This mass of gaudy, unnatural, computer-generated colors hurt the eyes. All of this combined to make the pic the ugliest I've seen on the Net. The page's background color was an ugly teal, that clashed with the multi-colored pic.

There were several small pics of the logo, which had letter parts missing. This was from typography without knowledge of screen reproduction and/or poor scanning.

The design of the page was very amateurish. The page was unnecessarily busy, and contained every index for the site. The index could have been on a second page, or subindexes on subsequent pages. Everything was centered, except for tables that were not aligned properly. A Web font was used, and everyone does not have Web fonts--a bad decision for this audience. The fonts that was chosen, would not be appropriate for a city, and would have been more appropriate for an engineering drawing.

The copywriting (headline messages) would have been cliche in the 1960's, but is humorous in the 1990's.

The conclusion
  1. Not all graphic designers can design a Web page;
  2. Not all dvertising agencies know effective Web communications/marketing;
  3. All aspects of marketing must be considered, including the choice of art, and the wording of the headlines
  4. Knowledge of effective and tasteful image handling and modification is necessary;
  5. Web developers are not trained in communications;
  6. The quality and effectiveness of a Web page is a message to the viewer.
Return to "Articles for Art Students, and Academic Resume of Gerard Bowles" at: http://members.aol.com/grbowles/AcadRes.html

Return to Gerard Bowles' Business Resume at: http://members.aol.com/GRBowles/BusRes.html

Email: To Email page