Analyzed websites

The Times News site is one I use from time to time. I don’t like this site overall. I think the navigation is too small for those who aren’t the steadiest with a mouse (I find a lot of people get upset about not being able to click where they want). I understand that the newspaper makes money from its advertisers, but I am overwhelmed with advertisements when I log on to this site. I find that when I read the newspaper I read a lot more of the stories than if I look at the site. That is good for me-it’s a huge time saver. But most website’s are trying to get you to spend some time there. There is a lot of information on this site, and it is ever-changing. I wouldn’t want to be in charge of doing the updating, that is for sure. I noticed that it is styled with tables, and not much CSS. I had to direct input this site for the Validation Checker, and it did not pass. It had 132 errors and 35 warnings.

One site that I ran across years ago and thought was entertaining, is authorJK Rowling’s website. I had never run across one quite like it. I think it does a very good job of keeping visitors at the site for a while. It is a very graphic site; all you see at first is pictures, many of which are links. Since she is a children’s book author, a majority of visitor’s at her site are kids and I am sure they find the activities more entertaining than any information the site contains. She does also have a diary section to talk with her fans, and news of upcoming events as well. It is a very slow loading site, and it is not always easy to figure out how to get back to the main page. But overall I like this site. This site is designed using tables, as well. The only CSS I noticed was to style font. When I tried to validate this site, it did not pass either, with 20 errors and 27 warnings.

I am batting a thousand when it comes to tables. I picked another author site, this time Diana Gabaldon. All styling with this site appears to be done with tags. I think this site is easy enough to navigate, but I am not thrilled with the color choices. This site is definitely more information driven than JK Rowling’s, but Diana’s books are geared towards adults. I think both sites took time to think about who their target audience would be. In the Validation Checker, this one failed as well with 24 errors and 20 warnings. I had this many once, and found when I closed a tag I had missed almost all of the errors went away. So sometimes it is just a simple fix for these sites. I noticed a couple of the errors were tags that were not open; I just wonder how many errors would go away with that fixed. Most of the rest of the errors were “there is no attribute ***.” I think this site could validate with a little work. Of course it would be nice to have it styled CSS to make any changes and updates easier.