Critical Evaluation Of A Nominated Website For Responsive Web Design

The purpose of the report is to provide a critical evaluation of the nominated website and to support your observations and comments convincingly. The nominated website should be reviewed using Google Chrome’s device simulator. For the purpose and intention of this assessment, use only the device simulator for your reviews. This is to ensure that all students have access to consistent and identical review tools.Your review of the nominated website must be thorough and sufficiently comprehensive to include 5 different screen displays. The recommended settings are as follows. Students are free to select the different simulated device (in the Chrome device simulator) they would like to use for the reviews.
(1) Large Display
Generic notebook or desktop with display greater than 1280x768 pixels.
(2) Medium Display
Any mobile device with display approximately 480x640 to 700x960 pixels, in both landscape and portrait orientation.
(3) Tiny display
Any mobile device with display approximately 200x320 to 400x640 pixels, in both landscape and portrait orientation. 

Your report should include:
(1) Clearly identify the nominated website. Provide an overview and description of the nominated website.
(2) Identify and elaborate the main feature or features of the website.
(3) Identify the positive and negative aspects of the website. Draw particular attention to the interaction and usability aspects of the interface.
(4) Invite two other persons to review the nominated website. All reviewers should use identical device settings. These participants can be your friends, family members or classmates etc. Provide the background (i.e. age, gender, profession) of the participants. Do their views differ from yours State why or why not.

(5) Based upon your critique and observation in items (1) to (4) of the above, provide a recommendation on how the website should be improved. Conversely, if it does not require further improvement, then provide the reason why that this is the case.
(6) Except for item (4) of the above, all assertions relating to RWD design principles (e.g. statements like ‘blue text on red background is a poor colour combination’ ) must be supported by references or critical observation. You can cite additional scholarly references other than the textbook. (Note: Do not use Wikipedia as a source of reference).
(7) Comment on the tools (i.e. Chrome device simulator) you used for the review. Elaborate on the advantages and disadvantages of such a tool. Search and briefly comment on similar tools available for testing and reviewing RWD web pages.

Background and Purpose

The responsive website designing is a good designing technique that enable the development of website to enable the adaptation of the various group of people who uses different devices to access internet where those devices do vary in terms of the screen sizes, platforms used , and the orientations.

In responsive web designing there is use of variety of layouts ,images and the grids, however all this is achieved by use of the CSS styles and HTML languages too.

The responsive websites makes it easy for the for the users to keep on switching among various devices where the websites  resolutions, images sizes and quality is maintained.

The responsiveness in website is as a result of technology growth where it easily responds to the needs of the users and thus there will be single design to be accessed by all devices used .

However in order to call a design responsive the designer is required to have used CSS and HTML IN ORDER to do resizing ,hiding shrinking and enlarging of the webpage together with the movement of its content this is to ensure that there is flexibility in webpage and the WebPages will fit any screen of device without scrolling and to resize it.

Below are few reasons of using the responsive websites design as the current technology.

1. High use of mobile devices:

The current trend over 50% of the people has Smartphone’s and the website traffic from the mobile phones is almost 61% therefore the websites developed require to be responsive to avoid the clients going to the competitors websites.

1. The growth in online mobile shopping:

The online shopping has become very easy where it spares much time instead of going to shop physically ,however a big number of about 81% of the mobile users do shop online hence there is chance of rise in responsive designing.

1. Raise in number of visitors in the Social Medias.

More than 54% of social media visitors uses the mobile devices therefore for any website to have many followers it need to share its links which are responsive.

1. Improving rank in the search engine optimization.

The responsive design is recommendable for any mobile device ,therefore it also increases the ranks in the and thus websites made should be friendly to the mobile devices users since this is recommendable by search engines like the Google.

makezine Nominated  Website Responsiveness.

This is a report about responsive in website design ,where to make website responsive makes it more appealing while it is displayed in any device like the laptop, computer ,tablet or even mobile phones.

However the website responsiveness is achieved by use of the CSS and HTML languages that are used to do resizing, hiding, shrinking ,enlarging and maving of the content to ensure that webpage looks very good in any of the devices regardless the size.

The makermedia is a website that is owned by a movement called the maker movements that its main objective is promoting of the innovations, creativeness and learning in order to boost the communities and ensure the betterment of their future.

However this maker group entails the group of the parents, tinkerer, educators and those in their professions.

Responsive Web Designing

The maker movement also is made of variety of people of different age the elderly and the youths, who mainly are engaged in the process of talents development and finding of means of interest resolutions where this is achieved through working on some projects as a team.

In making the people are able to express themselves and thus enable them to be creative, communal development and encouragement in terms of innovativeness.    

The maker website is made of various features, these features are located in different positions of the websites and they are used to perform a specific function (Jeremy, 2015, p. 135).The website has various WebPages and each webpage is split into three parts which are:The Tag’s lines:This is the line that is placed slightly below the logo and it is used to describe the function of the organizations for this case is called “call for young makers”.The horizontal navigation bar:This is a feature that is placed at the top part of the website and it is made of various menus and links to other pages.

v. Sign in form: This is a feature that is used to allow the members to login the website and post some projects.

vi. Sign  up form:This is a form that is used by the users to register to be members and enable them to sign in the websites accounts later.

1. News aggregator form: This is feature that allows the users to sign up in order to be receiving the newsletters into their email addresses.
2. i. Images gallery: This is the feature where a group of images are placed in the website that displays some of the projects done in the organization.
3. ii. Image links: These are the links that directs users to some WebPages and they are linked using the images in the gallery but not the texts.
4. Video and Video links: These are the videos that are attached to the website to display a series of the events that takes place in the website.
5. Internal links :These are the links which are used to direct users to other WebPages ,some supplements the images links.
6. i. Contacts forms: This is feature that provides the users with a form to send some of their enquiries to the management.
7. ii. Newsletter signing up form: This is the part where  the users enters their email addresses to subscribe for the news letter.
8. iii. Social media’s buttons: This is the links used to link the users to the social medias like the twitter, facebook , pintrest and the instagram.
9. iv. Vertical menu bar: This is the menu that will be used to link the users to the other WebPages of this website.

The makezine website is a website that is developed well to ensure that It is fully repeonsive ,below are the major advantages and disadvantages of this website.

Positive.

1. User friendliness: This website is user friendly since there are all necessary features and the links re all easy to access.
2. Compatibility: The website is able to be accessed by any of the devices either large or tiny and it fits the respective screen sizes.
3. Adjusting Screen Resolution: The website is able to adjust to any screen of the devices and the functions ,colors are maintained regardless of screen size or the orientation (Erin, 2014, p. 156) .
4. Media Displaying  Issues: This website is able to do resizing of the WebPages pictures and videos  to fit any of the media devices used to access it.
5. The website Search Engine is Optimized: The website is easily displayed on the browser since it is already optimized.

Negative.

1. Hiding WebPages Content :The website while it is accessed by some devices there are features like the menus and vides  which are not displayed.
2. Usage  of videos: The website is using the videos which lead to slowing down the loading speed of the website since they are too heavy to load.
3. There is too much scrolling: Most of the WebPages are very lengthy  and the users are forced to scroll down the page wasting much time.
4. Slow  in loading speed: The WebPages are too heavy due to too many images and videos in the home page  therefore they end up loading very slowly.

Website Review By Two Other Persons.

The website responsiveness was however reviewed by some other people who are friends from another college as the following details.

1. Friend

Age: 24 years old.

Gender: Male

Profession : IT specialist.

2. Friend

Age: 24 years old.

Gender: Male

Profession : IT specialist.

Reviews:

The two reviewers were able to give their reviews about the system where some were positive and others were negative as follows:

1. The website was slow in loading speed .
2. The website web pages were very lengthy to scroll down.
3. The website was compatible to all the devices large and tiny ones.
4. The website was having so many images making the homepage look crowded.

However the reviewer’s opinions were not different from my opinion since the website was slow to load and there were much of images and videos that made the website very slow.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Chrome Responsive Web Design Tester

1. More Mobile Traffic: This tool is able to improve the level of the website traffics since many user of various devices are able to access the websites and hence the traffic is high (Ethan, 2014,p. 56) .
2. Faster Mobile Development at Lower Costs: The ability of the mobile devices to access the  website has lead to many mobile devices to be developed and thus users increase the traffic level too.
3. Low Maintenance Need: This tool is used to test that the website can be accessed by any device and thus one website is developed to be accessed by any of the devices regardless the sizes.
4. Faster WebPages: This tool is used to test responsiveness of website and thus it ensures that the website developed is fast to access.
5. Improved Search engine optimization: This tool is used to ensure that the website is highly responsive and is optimized for easy searching using the browsers.

Disadvantages.

i. Load Speed: The website loading speed cannot be improved by the tool since it only tests the responsiveness of the website.

ii. The respect of usages: The tool is quite tricky to use if the people using it has no experience on how to use it.

iii. Web browsers Compatibility: The tool however does not support the compatibility issues since there are many new devices that are invented daily.

Other responsive tester tool.

Below are the examples of the responsive website tools:

1. Resizer  tool.

This is a tool used in the chrome browser and is used to to optimization of the websites and it is easy to use by any one:

Conclusion

The website responsiveness is one of the major requirements for the website designers, however the website responsiveness is tested by help of the responsive web design testing tools.The website is therefore said to be responsive if I is able to fit in any of the devices regardless the device size sizes.

However some website are slow and thus less responsive therefore to increase the website speed, ensure there are limited number of images and videos in order to boost the website’s loading speed.

The responsive website is require to be developed using the specified CSS and HTML languages ,this is to ensure that the websites can be able to fit in any mobile devices by any user .

However the responsive web designing has been boosted by various factors which includes rise of the number of the social media visitors, the online shopping that is adopted by many of internet users and also the rise in usage of the smartphones by more than 70% of the people in the society.

Therefore for any website owner to be successful should adopt the new technology of the responsive web design, this is in order to retain and increase the number of their website visitors.

Recommendations

The website had a number of good features however due to some of the disadvantages and to improve the performance of the website I recommend some changes to be made which includes the following.

1. Use of slideshow: The website should be inserted a slide show and then the multiple images to be consolidated in the slideshow this will minimize the WebPages space used by images.
2. Removal of the videos: The website videos should be eliminated this is to boost the loading speed  of the pages.
3. Inserting the search options: The website should have field to do searching for some of the items that the users want to search from the website or the other websites.
4. Elimination of the vertical menus in the footer: The vertical menu in the footer should be eliminated this is to avoid redundancy in terms of menus used.
5. Minimizing the Webpage heights: The WebPages height is required to be minimized by reducing number of images and also eliminating the videos used as well

References

Dan,C.(2016) CSS3 For Web Designers. 5^th edn.New York :

A Book Apar.

Ethan,M.(2014) Responsive Web Design.1^st edn. New York :

A Book Apart.

Erin,K.(2014) The Elements of Content Strategy.3^rd edn.London :

Olympia publishers.

Jeremy,K.(2015) HTML5 for Web Designers. 3^rd edn.New York :

 A Book Apart.