These Sites Are A Sight!

 

    Let's indulge in everyone's favorite internet past-time, pettily picking apart someone else's hard work! Come on, it's loads of fun, and leaves you feeling superior by comparison! I kid, I kid...well, kind of. You see, today, we're dismantling websites, and analyzing (constructively mind you) what they're doing right, and what they're doing wrong. I realize of course that nearly every project, in hind site, has aspects that could have been executed more effectively. In breaking down these websites I will hopefully develop the insights necessary to create the ultimate, irresistible, honey trap of a website I need to trick people into caring about my audiodramas and art! Bwahahahahaha!

 

The Bad Ones

    First up on the chopping block is, my own current website The Lucid Nap where I am supposedly advertising my audiodramas, podcasts and art. I guess all of that jazz must come under the tiny little  "productions" tab on the top navigation menu.

Cute artwork though!

 

 

 That is, unless you're viewing the website, like 95% of the world is, through their smart phone...then you get this mess.

Okay, so do I click menu then?

Shop, productions, Patreon... and you say this site does audiodramas or something? Where?

    The text over the inital image reads "Surprises Await You!" Well, people searching the site don't want to be surprised thanks, they want to be able to easily search out what they came for. If they don't find it quickly and easily, well then it's off to the next site.

    The way this little, yellow turd is set up now, your eye is immediately drawn to the bizarre artwork featured.

Oh look, a tiny little text box up at the top that says something about an animated podcast. I'm sure lots of people noticed that way before they saw...

A cute girl (Meg Ryan) suffering some dork (me circa 2016), a cute girl (Anna Zinova) battling a robot, and a cute girl (Lia Dearborn) tending to a flower shaped like an anatomical human heart.

 

 

 

    The artist of this work (me) clearly enjoys drawing beautiful women, and its more or less impossible to look at anything else. This artwork alone overpowers any text that might promote a podcast. If it is an animated podcast, like they say in that tiny, boring, text blurb, then why not give us a short clip to watch with a link? The whole point of animation is that its visual! Bad design from someone who clearly doesn't know what they are doing (me again!)

    If we look at the shop by category, we see comics, stickers for a show called Creeping Wave Radio and prints for the same. Creeping Wave Radio is mentioned twice but as of yet, we have no idea what it is! Is it another comic, an art collection, a board game? Who knows, it's a mystery. This must be one of those "Surprises" that "Awaits." The casual scroller doesn't know what Creeping Wave Radio is, and doesn't care. Why are there no clip of the show? No reel of the cover art for each episode to entice us (clearly it exists, the site is selling prints!) Whet out appetites for goodness sake, or are you afraid someone might actually listen? (Probably.)

    The actual artwork featured is repetitive, with the same pieces showing up again and again.

Corporate needs you to find the differences between this row and this row.

    What is the reason for that? You have to show a full range of art and prints available! If people don't see what they want right off the bat, then why would they click on the store button to see more?

    Okay, great, so let's click on that top Nav shall we? I'll go with artwork. Oh look, there's at least a pulldown menu for this one! Let's see what type of art they have here. UGHHH! Yet another problem. There's so much artwork available and the categories its divided into are obscure and do little to give any explanation of what we'll find within.

    For Mom, Books, Artwork, Creeping Wave Merch. 

     For Mom? How is this artwork for mom? Does it deal with themes of motherhood or did the web designer make a change to the menu for a Mothers' Day promotion and was just too lazy to change it back?

    Books? This site sells books? Since when? All we've seen is weird pin up art.

    What does Dark and Decadent entail? Is it a decadent as in sexy? Is it dark as in colour scheme or as in morbid? 

    Does Science Fiction feature pictures of space ships and references to popular shows and movies? Or is it just sexy robot pin ups? 

    Then there's stickers. Are these stickers of the prints, stickers from the comics or podcasts? Who knows!

    Oh look, there's Creeping Wave Merch...but the site has made no attempt to inform us of just what this Creeping Wave is or why we should care about it.

    Overall, not a great website. It looks like it was designed by someone with big ambitions, who was overwhelmed by the web building process and just said, "Well, good enough I guess. I'll fix it up later" BUT THEY NEVER DID!!!

    The site has potential, there's a clear colour scheme. We see the very beginnings of branding, with the yellow, red and grayscale carried over into the art featured at the top of each page. 

    The "About Us" page keeps with the same look and feel as the home page with a similar graphic. Unfortunately, the website really doesn't make me want to know anything about the creators, it just makes me want to click away! I've never even met these people and already I hate them! (Actually, I may have met one the one with the horns, he's okay.)

    The Shop section is a jumbled mess. There's some good art here, and some loose categories, but I don't want to dig through 40 or 50 pieces to find what I want. How about some tags to help me search?

No order to this at all.

    If you just click on productions you get a boring wall of text!

YAWN!

    However, if you click the dropdown menu links, you do get a little bit of info, at long last, about these alleged audiodramas and podcasts that the weirdo who set up this site claims to make.

    The last link goes to that wretched art prints page once more. No thanks! I won't force you to look at that mess again!

    After drizzling this confusion across the web, the designer actually has the audacity to post an outside link to their Patreon page,

 their online portfolio,

and the contact page, which is absolutely useless. The email link is broken, and there's just a long line of social media buttons. It's as if the web designer really doesn't want to be found! Maybe it's because they're trying to put a pitch and pilot episode of whatever Creeping Wave Radio is together. What an ass!

    Seriously, it's like they don't actually want to open themselves up to new clients, because they know that the level of clientele they pull in can only pay about $35-$40 for original artwork, and that's when you can actually get them to pay. Its almost as if the web designer is aware that said art requires months of labor, constant edits, long bantering phone calls with printing houses who want to contest what .25" of bleed is and precludes the artist from taking on other projects, advancing their education or working on anything of their own. The site creator seems cognizant of he fact that these $30-40 gigs don't even cover a days work at CA minimum wage ($15/hour.) Yet the artist also knows that should they dare to say no to a project, their name will be smeared around social media as a money hungry prima-donna, who thinks they're too good to work with "regular people."

    Maybe the person who created this site should start a public blog or something, admitting to being a misanthropic, cynical recluse who see's human relationships as a chore. It seems to be the temperament of most writers anyway. That and it would probably be better to come out on their own terms rather than having their more beguiling public persona revealed as an elaborate lie to get likes.

    Really, they wouldn't even have to go that far. They'd probably be just as well off making some kind of an update, letting people know that they're busy with an independent project right now. They could even share the process through a blog or YouTube channel- but will they do that? No! Instead, the creator of this webpage would rather just hide away, and shirk off the demands of potential clients because they are horrified by the very real prospect of failure.

    The idea of being trapped in a life where they can only show their art at conventions or pop up shows at coffee shops and pizza hut private party rooms feels like slow suffocation to them. Yet, they're supposed to be an artist, and artists are all free spirits, who don't care a bit about financial security or recognition, right? Artists are supposed to create purely for the joy of personal expression, which means what they produce should be cheap, even free...that is if they're a true artist!

    Should the site creator fail in pitching their series, these pop up shows and ill paying gigs will be all that's left to them, and they know it. Well, they don't know it exactly. They're obviously too much of a coward to submit to more reputable galleries, so they just keep trudging around the smaller shows that they know they won't get rejected from. They'd rather simply disappear, go through a digital death, than ever share their struggle to escape this cycle. After all, the people who follow their social media, are very likely the same people they are so desperate to escape from. People who would try like mad to drag them back down into the mire of permanent adolescence. A mire that this creator is endeavoring to crawl out from.

    I give this website a 2/10. The art is cute and the colour scheme is nice. Beyond that, its very shoddy work. I hate it! The person who made it should suffer mightily!

Atari Best Electronics CA

    In an age where most people are functionally illiterate, speaking through emoji's, gifs and movie quotes to one another, Atari Best Electronics CA has defied convention and gone with a website that is entirely text. This is a bold choice, but is it a good one?

 

    As an avid reader myself, even I'm overwhelmed by these bold black letters, cascading down a stark white background. There is an animated Atari gif in the corner that changes colour, which is fun. Unfortunately, when given such a load of writing to process, this cheerful gif serves as more a distraction than anything else.

    There's a great deal of information to be consumed here, and no padding to keep it neatly from the edges of the browser window. The fact that the site has a liquid design, meaning the contents collapse and expand with the browser, in this case is a negative. It makes it difficult to hold your place as you try and consume the wealth of information offered.

    There are graphics, and very clean, crisp ones at that! You can see them when you click the blue links.

    

     There is also a good deal of text that accompanies these images, and many many links. There is a veritable Narnia of links to be found within this website, taking you on an endless adventure from one page to the next. While fascinating, it makes it very difficult to navigate back home.

    There doesn't seem to be any kind of structure or framework to these pages. They read as extraordinarily long and overly detailed blog posts (of which I am the master, and must applaud Atari's efforts.) However, as with my exhaustively long blog posts, people read a few paragraphs, then lose interest.

    I do understand that in electronics, there is a great deal of pertinent information that must be communicated.  I wonder if perhaps a welcome video on the home page might be a good solution? 

    There are so many products, and so many links, yet no menus to help categorize them. If I had come to the page looking for a very specific piece of equipment, then it would be difficult for me to find it. There is no clear search feature that I have found. It reminds me a great deal of web pages I made in Geo Cities or Angel Fire back in the 90's.

    I chose this page specifically to comment on because it has the exact opposite problem of The Lucid Nap. This page has so much info that it is overwhelming. Contrary to this,  the images on The Lucid Nap don't really convey what the site is trying to advertise and lead people to believe that the only thing available are art prints. 

    Either way, the outcome is the same. People online are impatient, and if they don't see what they want immediately, they click away. 

    I give this website a 4/10, because the web creator does seem knowledgeable and passionate. It's really just the structure that is lacking here.

 

The Good Ones

Welcome To Night Vale

    Welcome To Night Vale is not only an audiodrama, but also a traveling stage show, a novel series and boasts its own line of merchandise. However, the audiodrama is first and foremost among these. Therefore, site opens with some positive reviews right at the top.

Even if you'd never heard of this show, you'd be intrigued.

    Next, the site goes on to explain what "Welcome To Night Vale" is, and where you can find it online.

There are helpful links for people new to the series.

    Next is the sponsorship slots. Without sponsors, an audiodrama or podcast show runner is putting in all the work of a full time job without getting compensated. If you work with a cast, the way this show does, it means you'd essentially be asking your talent to work for free. Either that, or the show runner would be paying everyone out of pocket. You can survive on crowd funding, like IndieGogo or Kickstarter  for a while, but eventually, you need a regular income stream. Selling sponsorships allows a podcast to pay their cast and crew, maintain a professional workplace and to update their equipment. All these things mean that an audiodrama is able to constantly improve the quality of the show. 

 

    This site shows existing sponsors and gives the necessary information for new sponsors to sign up. Existing sponsors helps lend credibility to this show. These reputable companies support us, so you'd be safe doing so as well!

     The latest updates are available at the bottom of the page, along with a place to sign up for the newsletter.

    These are the most important elements of their audiodrama. While they offer novels, shows and merch, those things don't take up real estate on the home page. They are tucked neatly into the top nav. The web creator really wants you to hear the show first, then come back for the other goodies. This is a strategy that Needs to be implemented on The Lucid Nap. 

    Yes, this is for a single audiodrama and not a production company like Lucid Nap, but...

 The Website Night Vale Presents actually hosts multiple podcasts, denoting each with a neatly organized square graphic. On roll over, you can see the name of each show, including Welcome To Night Vale.

    This is an extremely simple page, but it gets the job done without overwhelming people with information or unrelated graphics. There is also an About, Contact, and Sponsor Us section right on top.

Shows in the Night Vale Presents network

     The links take you to clear, easy to understand pages, that have the necessary information, but aren't fussy with graphics.

About Us

Contact Us

Sponsor Us

    At the bottom of this page, there is a sponsor code, and place to subscribe to the newsletter, and get updates about Night Vale Presents. Again, these are the most important elements, sponsorship and keeping in touch with an existing audience base. These are two things that The Lucid Nap fails to do.

     I think the order and cleanliness of these two web pages are perfect examples of the less is more strategy. They are set up to communicate a main point, and do so succinctly. It's the model I will be trying to put forward with my own design in the future.

P.S. I posted on all the Green Group's blogs- Ivan Vincent, Kate Strong, Jan Neff-Sinclair, Sophia Hecker, Yoshinori Enomoto, and Jessica Brown.