To begin, with the first of the three websites, I decided to evaluate "http://www.yardbarker.com" which is a popular sporting website specialising in sports rumours, gossip, opinions and humour. Since, according to ebizmba.com, this appears to be a popular website - I decided that it would be an ideal place to start when searching for websites on which to base my own!From looking, it is possible to tell that this website is designed for a slightly older audience than that of "BA sports" and as a result, many fonts and styles may be different. For example, the fonts are fairly basic and do not attract the user's attention as much as "Apple Boy BTN" however, this creative decision is reasonable, considering the older target audience that I predict this website is for!
As you can see by the screenshot of their homepage, YardBarker have little or no web banner. Instead, they have a large graphic of the title of their website. While this is not the technique I will be adopting, it is worth noting that this is a popular design decision and should be remembered for future projects - if necessary. Interestingly though, this banner/title is offset to the left side of the screen, giving what I think is a modern and professional feel.
With YardBarker, their navigational/rollover bar is, as you would expect, placed horizontally towards to the top of the screen. It is worth noting that this website does not contain the equally popular vertical navigational bar. In terms of rollover behaviour, the YardBarker ones are relatively basic and simply turn red when rolled over. While my rollover buttons are somewhat more complex, I don't feel that they are over the top and fit my target audience as intended.
Interestingly, this website does not seem to feature any dynamic logo. This could be because they want the focus of their website to be it's content: the sport. Therefore, logos and web banners may dominate too much of the user's attention and as a result, I understand why such elements have been missed out.
Unfortunately, the website's backgrounds are fairly minimal and are simply a white background with a black border. However, I do like the simplicity of this background - partly for the same reasons as above, but also because the use of black and white in the colour scheme seems very modern and professional. However, this has little relevance to our project since our colour scheme is quite vastly different.
In terms of general layout, the website gives the impression that it has been designed with a similar layout to that in a newspaper. For example, the text is arranged into short columns and is dotted with many pictures to reduce the amount of worded-content. I feel that this layout is excellent for a news-related website and that elements of this style could easily be incorporated into our website to give it a similarly professional vibe.
Secondly, I have decided to look at equally popular "Sky Sports" in order to evaluate the design of this website.
It is noticeable on sky sports that their logo and web banner are more or less the same thing. As you can see, this logo/banner is situated in the same place as in YardBarker and, as expected, it follows the colour scheme of blue and red - which is actually closer to mine than YardBarker.
Interestingly with the navigation bar, when you roll over each button, it is not that button that changes in appearance. Instead, every other button changes to a more faded blue. This is a very interesting technique and is a little more original since it does the same job, but in a slightly different way.
I have also noticed that none of these websites so far have featured animated gifs. Possibly because of the low resolutions and associations with children. However, I feel that animated gifs would fit in perfectly with my website since it is designed predominantly for children.
In terms of layout, this website uses a sidebar of images on the right but, apart from this, no other images are used on the page. This website differs from the last in that the text is horizontal on Sky Sports instead of in vertical columns. This means that more text can fit onto each page although, this means that the text is less interesting but more conventional to look at - in my opinion.
Finally, I decided to review "http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com" which is often abbreviated to simply "SI". If the favourite of the three websites, SI.com is simple yet stylish and uses many of the digital graphics that we have designed for our project.
Contrary to this though, the web banner and loco have, once again, been merged as in sky sports. However, this banner is much less dominant and only takes up a small space in the top left.
The rollover buttons work in exactly the same way as in "YardBarker" does: the text simply turns red. This design seems increasingly popular with websites with this target audience.
This is the first website I have come across that features screen icons. Although these icons are used in a slightly different way than in the way that we planned, this is an excellent example of how icons can be used on websites. The icons are situated towards the bottom of the page and serve as a 'links' section to get to Facebook pages, twitter pages or podcasts etc.
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