SITE
www.chestertourist.com
TYPE
Travel
SCREENSHOT
www.chestertourist.com
TYPE
Travel
SCREENSHOT
(as on 09/03/2012)
ABOUT IT
Chester Tourist is a travel guide & ticket booking site which describes the tourist attractions, buildings and archaeology of Chester, U.K.
PROS
The only good thing you can find in this site is that it has few accessibility options.
CONS
Bad organization, bad color scheme, confusing navigation, inconsistent tables & pages, useless & dead links and the list goes on...
THE VERDICT
The site provides a lot of services but due its poor design and inconsistent organization of the home page, it does not attract users and confuses them in return.
REVIEW
First look
The first thing you will notice when you enter this website is that the site have a poor & cheap look. The black and red combination, the changing gif images, changing table headers, unevenly placed content, odd looking and almost invisible search bar, very small navigating menus and its transparent drop-down options, all adds up to a ugly and inconvenient browsing experience. The site doesn't provide the purpose-of-site anywhere on homepage. So users are definitely confused about what this site is actually for and what services it offers.
Design
Though the site is targeted for tourists, it has a pretty bad design. The color scheme used is completely inappropriate. The black background, red tables, mixture of white and pale yellow for text is causing a dizziness while reading according to w3schools.com & randomterrain.com. "Some color blind users are lacking the capability to detect the lower color wave frequencies associated with red." -accessibility.psu.edu. All the content, from top title to last designed by, are inconstantly placed not only on homepage but in all pages. They are zigzag without proper alignment. It is explained in more detail in following paragraphs.
Navigation
As stated above, the navigation options to various pages of the site are very small and hard to recognize. When mouse over, they generate a slow, transparent drop-down menu. The text everywhere is in small font. For a quick access to pages, there is also a google-powered search bar. The problem is, though the search bar is placed on the top right next to the heading, due to its black text place & button it is hard to find for anyone. There is a javascript for bookmarking the page. The worst thing of all is that it has dead links everywhere. The text and hyperlinks have the same color which makes spotting a hyperlink hard. Mid-level users can find pages in Site map, which is one of the notable and usefull links on homepage. It also have links to social networking sites somewhere in the middle of the homepage instead of on top or at bottom. Advertisements are really annoying and badly placed across all pages.
Accessibility
The navigation elements and content or body of the site is completely out of proportion. The navigation elements are very small and one can barely understand that they are navigation elements. The uneven red tables on a black background will cause a lot of confusion for all kinds of users. Even though the site is cross-browser compatible, the font cant be increased beyond certain size. This will cause trouble for elderly users. As for visually impaired users, this site is no good at all. There are no proper description for anything, the pictures doesn't have alt tags and due to random arrangement of tables it will be confusing when a text narrator is used. Also there is no text based alternative for important multimedia.
Recommendations
My best recommendation is that to completely change the page template of the site and place the same content but, now, properly organized and in a more user-friendly way. This time it has to be designed with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, WCAG 1.0 & 2.0 in mind and also must be well tested before restarting the site & well maintained later on.
Chester Tourist is a travel guide & ticket booking site which describes the tourist attractions, buildings and archaeology of Chester, U.K.
PROS
The only good thing you can find in this site is that it has few accessibility options.
CONS
Bad organization, bad color scheme, confusing navigation, inconsistent tables & pages, useless & dead links and the list goes on...
THE VERDICT
The site provides a lot of services but due its poor design and inconsistent organization of the home page, it does not attract users and confuses them in return.
REVIEW
First look
The first thing you will notice when you enter this website is that the site have a poor & cheap look. The black and red combination, the changing gif images, changing table headers, unevenly placed content, odd looking and almost invisible search bar, very small navigating menus and its transparent drop-down options, all adds up to a ugly and inconvenient browsing experience. The site doesn't provide the purpose-of-site anywhere on homepage. So users are definitely confused about what this site is actually for and what services it offers.
Design
Though the site is targeted for tourists, it has a pretty bad design. The color scheme used is completely inappropriate. The black background, red tables, mixture of white and pale yellow for text is causing a dizziness while reading according to w3schools.com & randomterrain.com. "Some color blind users are lacking the capability to detect the lower color wave frequencies associated with red." -accessibility.psu.edu. All the content, from top title to last designed by, are inconstantly placed not only on homepage but in all pages. They are zigzag without proper alignment. It is explained in more detail in following paragraphs.
Navigation
As stated above, the navigation options to various pages of the site are very small and hard to recognize. When mouse over, they generate a slow, transparent drop-down menu. The text everywhere is in small font. For a quick access to pages, there is also a google-powered search bar. The problem is, though the search bar is placed on the top right next to the heading, due to its black text place & button it is hard to find for anyone. There is a javascript for bookmarking the page. The worst thing of all is that it has dead links everywhere. The text and hyperlinks have the same color which makes spotting a hyperlink hard. Mid-level users can find pages in Site map, which is one of the notable and usefull links on homepage. It also have links to social networking sites somewhere in the middle of the homepage instead of on top or at bottom. Advertisements are really annoying and badly placed across all pages.
Accessibility
The navigation elements and content or body of the site is completely out of proportion. The navigation elements are very small and one can barely understand that they are navigation elements. The uneven red tables on a black background will cause a lot of confusion for all kinds of users. Even though the site is cross-browser compatible, the font cant be increased beyond certain size. This will cause trouble for elderly users. As for visually impaired users, this site is no good at all. There are no proper description for anything, the pictures doesn't have alt tags and due to random arrangement of tables it will be confusing when a text narrator is used. Also there is no text based alternative for important multimedia.
Recommendations
My best recommendation is that to completely change the page template of the site and place the same content but, now, properly organized and in a more user-friendly way. This time it has to be designed with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, WCAG 1.0 & 2.0 in mind and also must be well tested before restarting the site & well maintained later on.
