Web Page Design and Layout- Jake McMahon

This week I really enjoyed being able to take a look into certain websites and get some more information as to what makes certain Web sites successful. At my job, I am constantly online and although I am usually on my company's Web site the majority of the time, I also have to hop onto other Web sites from time to time in order to gather other information for our customers. I obviously notice certain things about our site and other sites in general, but I had never examined them in depth to look at the elements that we learned about with this assignment. Things like color, simplicity, spacing and navigation had never really struck me as important, as I always simply focused on the fact that Web sites were either cool or not cool. However, after learning some of these elements, I was able to spend some time in examining our site to see that the designers certainly had some of these design staples in mind when creating the site. I also find myself focusing on these elements when looking into other sites and I have certainly been doing a lot of that lately with Christmas coming up! (Online shopping.) 

One of the Web sites that I notice that I often have trouble in navigating is actually one of our competitors, Lowes.com. I feel that there site is pretty nice, but when I am trying to quickly grab some information for our customers, I often have to reach out to their actual customer service team to get the information. As for actual errors, I was able to find one obvious one. 

It is obviously not a huge deal, but as we have learned in this class, the "Open until 9PM!" is incorrect, as the pm should be lower case and should follow the number with a space in between. I do not believe that their customers will see this and immediately shop somewhere else due to their grammatical error, but it is somewhat funny to notice things like this now that I have an expanded knowledge on the subject.