Martha Stewart is well known
for her poise and prestige
in the world of crafts, gardening, cooking, and decorating.The Martha Stewart web site allows Martha enthusiasts to easily access all of the wonderful craft ideas, cooking tips and recipes, decorating ideas, and gardening tips, as well as wedding planning and childcare help that is offered every day in her magazines and shows. The design of this sight and the colors used throughout, resemble the layout of her magazine, making marthastewart.com easier to recognize and become familiar with.
At first glance the design of this site seems cluttered and busy. It throws large amounts of information at people right away, making it overwhelming. If someone ends up at this sight without knowing much about Martha Stewart, her show or her magazine, they will find it confusing. The navigation bar on this site however, is very helpful, allowing visitors to easily find the information they are seeking or just look around for fun.
Purpose
Marthastewart.com's main purpose is to allow people easy access to the information that is published in Martha Stewart magazine and shown on Martha's television show. Using easy-to-follow text and design elements, the site serves as an assistant for wedding planning and childcare and a visual aid for crafts, cooking, gardening and decorating. Included in the site, is online shopping, allowing the purchase of Martha Stewart merchandise. The "share" navigation button brings members and browsers to a place where they can exchange ideas and recipes with other members, as well as get advice from Martha Stewart experts.
Audience
This web site's primary audience is people who watch Martha Stewart's shows and read her magazine, however it also has a secondary audience. Marthastewart.com is a helpful sight for males and females seeking ideas for or help with, crafts, recipes, household decorating, and gardening, whether they are an expert or just becoming interested.
Appearance
People who are not familiar with the colorful design of Martha Stewart's magazine may find this sight overwhelming at first. The overall appearance and layout of the navigation bars and graphics attribute understanding to both the primary and secondary audiences of the site. Each page, whether it be about a craft or a gardening technique has easy to understand copy along with great visual graphics backing up the copy. This creates a clearer representation of each tip to the audience. I know that I am definitely a visual learner. I sometimes find it hard to understand what someone is trying to tell me, or teach me, without a visual aid. Especially for a site like this, the appearance of graphics backing up the copy really emphasizes user ability.
The overall theme of marthstewart.com reflects the change in seasons and up-coming holidays
Accessibility
The design and many navigation bars allow easy access for anyone who is looking for a specific thing they saw in Martha's magazine or on her show. When looking for a specific recipe on marthastewart.com I became very impressed with the navigation elements and tools of this site, and how accessible the information is.
To further test out the navigation system of marthastewart.com I decided to do a search for recipes made with chicken. I first clicked on the "search" navigation button shown in the middle column on the home page. This brought me to a page that allows me to choose the area of my search. The options are; "The Perfect Gift, Our Best Recipes, Good Things, The Right Plant, and Holiday Ideas." I clicked on "Our Best Recipes" and found that I could either choose from the scrolling menu or click on the arrow. Clicking on the arrow brought me to a page that allowed me to further narrow my search or simply pick a category from several lists. Since I was looking for a recipe that specifically had chicken in it I typed "chicken" in the search box. This brought me a list of 148 different recipes with chicken in them, from condiments to soups and hordeurves. Clicking on a recipe opens up a page that shows a picture of the finished product along with an easy to understand recipe.
This navigation is consistant through out the site allowing viewers to adapt easily and become familiar with it overall.
Organization
The organization of marthastewart.com stays consistent from page to page. Though I do not like the scattered look of the many different boxes and navigation bars, it began to grow on me the longer I looked at the sight.
Excluding the home page of this site, the organization of each page from left to right is navigation, picture, advertisements. There are also some navigation bars along the top and bottom of each page.
There is no address, name or copyright date at the bottom of each page, like many other sites have. Instead there is once again another navigation bar. I did finally find the contact information by clicking on "About MSO" on the bottom of a page, and then clicking on "Contact Us" listed in the left column.
engl 3160>staging server>site review index>review of Marth Stewart's website
Copyright 2001 Lindsey Ryan Johnson
Questions and comments to lindseyryan@cheerful.com
Last modified: December 12, 2001
Creating Clarity, Order and Trustworthiness
These three elements can create confidence in a web site. It is important when looking at the clarity, order and trustworthiness of a website that we consider several things.
Clarity, order, and trustworthiness is created in marthastewart.com through:
- The designs of the graphics on the recipe and gardening pages back up the copy, making each page thorough and easily understood.
- Visual and functional continuance throughout, with the use of the navigation bars, lessened the confusion of the appearance of the site.
- Accuracy in the information. We know this site is accurate because Martha's magazines and television shows back it up.
- The different colors, though confusing at first, bring familiarity to the viewer because they resemble the same colors that are seen in Martha Stewart's magazine.
- Visually this sight is breathtaking. The graphics make the sight user friendly and easy to understand.
- The navigation bars, even though there are so many of them, are accurate. I did not run into one problem as I was picking through the site.
- The fonts through out the site were easy to read.
- The purpose of the sight is clearly to allow people easy access to the information in Martha Stewart's magazine and on her shows.
- The relationship of the information from page to page is accurate.
- This site has both a primary audience; people(males and females) who are familiar with Martha Stewart's show's and magazine, and a secondary audience; people (males or females) who are seeking ideas for, or help with, crafts, recipes, household decorating, or gardening.
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