The main feature on this website’s home page is the search engine so it is very clear to the user what the purpose of this site is. The homepage does not contain any information apart from quotes about the site from the Telegraph and the good web guide. The rest of the text on this page is the text for the options the user can choose within the search facility such as a preferred price, age range, gender etc. The layout of this page is good because the search facility takes up most of the page so it is very clear to the user that they have to select an option under each category within the search facility to find gifts.
This website’s search facility is really easy to use as all the options are already displayed and all the user has to do is click on the relevant option and it highlights their chosen option blue. Although this search engine does not have a basic and advanced search option, the options do change depending on the user’s choices, for example there is a character option and it shows different characters such as lively, adventurous, house proud etc. But if you change the age range to 0-1 years or 1-2 years, the character options disappear because the people in those age groups are too young to have a character like the ones listed. This makes the search facility more accurate by searching for gifts that are more appropriate for the recipient. The results returned are relevant to what the user searched for and also remind the user what they searched for at the top of the page and although the search results page has a lot of useful information such as websites where a certain product can be purchased, shops a product can be purchased and websites to compare prices of a product, the layout of the results isn’t very good as there is too much text too close together which makes the web page look very busy and unattractive. Also, this website doesn’t give the user a chance to enter keywords to search for gifts which is inconvenient for users who know what they are searching for but don’t know where to purchase it from.
The only way to navigate around this website is to use the search facility on the home page to get to the results page. Once the user is on the results page they can navigate away from it one of two ways. One of the ways is to click on the logo at the top of the page and they will be taken back to the home page and then a second way is to click on the links at the bottom of the page such as ‘gifts for him’, ‘gifts for her’, ‘gift finder’ etc. Although there aren’t many ways to navigate around this site, the navigation used works well.
The colour scheme for this website is red, white and black. The text used is always contrasting with the background which makes it easy for the user to read and also the font used is consistent throughout the site and is an appropriate size and font type. Having an appropriate font type and font size along with the font colour also improves readability.
This site is easy to use and functions well but is not very interesting or fun. The way the user navigates around the site and the way the search facility returns appropriate results to the user work well, but the lack of images and whitespace used on the site makes the site unattractive and boring. Also there isn’t any information about the products on this site such as a price or description so the user has to click the link which then directs them from the giftgen website to the website where the certain product is sold. Overall this site functions well but isn’t visually appealing.
Again, the gifts on this site are gifts from well known shops or websites where as the gifts that will be on my site will be from Hull’s small businesses so my website will give the user gift ideas that are different to these existing websites. I am going to provide more ways to search for gifts on my site and also create a visually appealing design.
Clothing:
