Gossip - People

Ah yes, gossip magazines and their websites. The place where common people like us go to live vicariously through the lives of the rich and famous. Everything about this website is design to grab your attention, from the vibrant blue background to the images and headlines. In fact, the website itself just seems like an extension of the magazine.

My god, even as I'm supposed to be reviewing this site I keep getting sucked in and reading silly articles. I think that goal has been successfully pulled off by the creators of People.

So, back to the review...the layout is dynamic and gets the eye floating from headline to headline without much difficulty. They have intriguing photos to catch the eye and superficial articles. That's all I can really say about it. Everything about gossip magazines are supposed to be shallow and I think this site pulls that off very well.

Real Estate - Ebby Halliday

It seems to me that there's a lot going on just on the first page. There's the main navigation, side navigation and a whole bunch of links for the main content. True the links are all about finding the perfect home or finding the right real estate agent, but still there are a lot of links none the less.

The content on each sub page lays out basically the same with only a few changes depending on the content itself. It seems everything is pretty much justified left. Actually the entire website is justified left, which leaves a gaping white space to the right of the screen. Honestly, I think this can be changed in order to keep from having to scroll down so much and to limit the amount of dead space that takes over.

There are a couple elements of Flash used, but only on certain pages. All in all though, it's not a bad website, it's not pretty, but since most people who come there are only interested in buying houses and whatnot, it doesn't need to be overly decorated.

Auto Manufacturer - Volkswagen of America

This site is extremely simple and easy to figure out. There is a small nav bar on the top right corner of the screen and then towards the middle there is another nav/search bar that allows you to look at the different cars they make. That nav bar kind of looks like a Winamp skin to me, but that's beside the point. The rest of the site is one big flash vid of a car driving at the bottom of the screen, with a bit of advertising for the Carbon Neutral Project as well.

From here on it's a matter of just browsing and playing with the Build A Car feature. I just played with building a two door Jetta and it was fairly interesting. You can choose between 5 or 6 colors, choose the engine, the interior, and the rear storage. After that it gives you the option to "breed" the car you made with three other cars and a rabbit (yes, a bunny rabbit). I tried the red car first, then tried the rabbit and was a bit disturbed by the results of the second.

Anywho, just browsing the different categories will tell you all you need to know about the Volkswagen cars.

Movie - Stardust

Let's see...this movie site is probably like almost every other movie site out there, but, you know, with it's own spin. It's got three main categories to choose from: Village of Wall, Starry Sky, and Kingdom of Stormhold. When you move the mouse over the page the camera moves, which can be a bit irritating if you're working on an older computer that can't handle much Flash and whatnot.

In the Village of Wall section it allows you to look at bios of the characters Tristan, Victoria and Humphrey. The Starry Sky section let's you create a star and send it to a loved one. The Kingdom of Stormhold let's you look at the rest of the character bios.

The rest of the site has all the other basic movie site stuff with games to play and wallpapers to download. They have a gallery, and about the movie page, and a soundtrack page too. So it's just your typical movie site.

Military - Canadian Armed Forces

The first thing you come across is a splash page that runs a flash video with loud rock music. The video itself is pretty interesting for a short promotional we're-the-Canadian-army-and-by-God-is-it-awesome montage. I do like how they have both French and English on the video as well as links for both languages on the splash page though.

Once you get to the actual home page the first thing that happens there is a video automatically loads and plays. I promptly turn this off as I have no interest, but that's beside the point. Basically the videos (and there are a few that play at random) are mostly interviews from what I gather by refreshing the page a few times. It also appears that they have a slideshow that plays after the video is done.

I like the banner and navigation layout. It has that military/tech feel that I always associate with military sites in general. There's also an option to turn off Flash and it becomes just a regular static website, although it doesn't look as appealing to be honest. The large banner becomes thinner and the rotating images becomes a static image with a headline and links to videos. Slightly less interesting to say the least. There are a lot of links in the top and side nav bars, and by "a lot" I mean about 24 in all. Granted they all seem necessary, but it still looks a bit excessive.

I'm not really digging the way they have the links to articles and vids, etc. laid out below the banner. I can see that they have three separate rows, but it just kinda looks ramshackle to me. They have headline links and images right beside the headlines that lead to the same place, which comes off as a bit redundant.

This sites looks to be all show and hardly any detail. When I go to another page such as Army Life or Equipment, I get a quick flash vid and then the information. But the information is only a paragraph long! That doesn't seem nearly enough to me. I mean, if I were a potential Canadian army applicant, I would want more information than what they readily give.

On a side note, the Recruiting button links offsite to an entirely different Flash webpage.