RATING SCIENCE FICTION SITES

Designing a web site is different from any other type of expression. A good site must be visually appealing and contain valuable content as well. Therefore, web sites should be critiqued in a unique way. When I look at a typical web site I consider several factors.

Overall Appearance-First Impression
The overall appearance and feel of a site plays a major role in how a user will react. A bad first impression of a site may cause a web surfer to back out of the site, even if the site has very good content. The first glance at a site can reveal a lot about its quality.

Valuable Content
A great looking site will attract a lot of attention, but not for very long if there is no valuable content. I'm sometimes disappointed that many sites have great content, but without the visual appeal, they will get overlooked. If the information is valuable and updated often, however, users will come to the site no matter what its appearance.

Other Factors
The above two factors are really the most important criteria I use to rate web sites. There are also some other factors that make some sites a little better than others, however. The download time can be a major concern for many people who are using a modem. Too many large images can really slow this process down. Poor HTML coding can be a problem. Sometimes a page will not load right due to this. In many cases, a site will look great in one browser, but horrible in another, simply because some browsers are more forgiving of HTML errors. Dead links are a major frustration, but are not always the fault of the web designer. The server may just be down for a while.

A great deal of skilled artistic design and hard computer programming goes into a web site. A perfectly working communication tool is very worthwhile reward for this hard work, however.