The website www.eventfinder.co.nz is a guide for events from concerts, festivals, to plays in theatres, sports and expos, gigs, live music and performing arts etc. in different cities of New Zealand.
Colour
At first the element which gets the attention first is the big changing slideshow with colour, changing every few seconds and showing the different top 6 events that's going on. On each of these slides shows the title and a few words telling what that event is about in white text.. Above the changing slideshow, the main links are in blue and when hovered over them, a blue line also appears so to know that link is about to be clicked on. What also shows above the main changing slide is the Eventfinder logo which as a bit of pink/purplish on the kiwi. The main colour for the background is white and it has a light shade of grey on both sides of the border. Even though white is commonly use for the background, "websites that want to give the appearance of being serious tend to use muted colours and a limited number" (Wysocki, 2004). Throughout the site, the hyperlink text on the site are all blue and the text and extra information are coloured light grey. This is to match the light grey borders. The images are all in colour as this makes the site more interesting and grabs the viewers attention to look at that event. A variety of colours are used in the different images relating to that type of event and even when the images are small, the use of the coloured images are clear to see. If the small images weren't in colour, event finders will find it uninteresting to look at.
Images
The changing slideshow of pictures is the main image on the homepage which keeps the event finders looking at for a while as it is colourful. The changing and dissolving of one picture into another makes it look as if its a short, sneak preview of a movie. This makes the event finders wanting to know more about it. If the event finder is wanting to go back a previous slide that they just saw, there are 6 little dots on the left side of the slideshow. But once it's clicked on, the slideshow stops changing automatically. By clicking on one of the events pictures on the slide "the current page disappears from screen to be replaced, bit-by-bit, by a new page; this is close to a jump cut in video or film" (Wysocki, 2004). The new page will give the viewer more information about that particular event.
A little down the homepage, the images becomes slightly smaller under the heading 'This weeks events'. It's smaller but without those square images beside the hyperlink events, it would not attract the viewers attention.
Also the thumbnail images are created to be small so that more events under different categories can fit. The thumbnail images are aligned to the left and the information are aligned right next to it on the right and which this is carried on through half down the page making the viewers to scroll down more
Near the bottom of the page under the 'Most popular events' section, it numbers down from the number 1 top event to 10 and its on blue circles which also coloured in blue making this eye catching to viewers to look to the left to the events.
Typeface
The Evenfinder logo stands out quite a bit, as the size is larger than the text and black and bold. The logo picture helps the word stand out by having some colours to the picture and keeping it close to the word to show it related to each other. The font of the eventfinder logo is a sans serifs typeface and so is the rest of the text on the site. It keeps the site looking simiple yet appropriate for this website genre.
The blue hyperlink text is consistently used throughout the site which goes well with the blue buttons, otherwise having other colours will not look well and not relate to any other elements on the site. Another reason why the blue hyperlink text is being used is that the website has a facebook page, and the facebook logo is also blue and which the hyperlink text matches with the facebook button and logo. The font for the facebook 'login' button is similar to the font that the website uses, because it's sans serif as well. Most of the text sizes on the site are set about size 10 to create space between elements, and it's something expected for this type of site. The text is readable and clear for young viewers to adults, because the text against the white background makes it easier to read even for older adults. But the additional information below the blue hyperlink is a little harder to read as it is smaller (sans serif, size 8.2) and a light shade of black (or silver).
Older adults maybe would find this hard to read at a normal distance and would have to look closer to the screen. This would cause some problems for the older viewers on the site.
Extended links
At the very bottom like every other website, there are links that are located to other areas of the website. Viewers can get lost once they leave the homepage. So to make it a little easier to find a particular information faster, it is placed under catergories. The event finder would "often read web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe" (Nielson, 2007). This is achieved by the viewer looking down the Home category and then the viewer's eye will move across to look at the other titles of that category. There's even an Eventfinder, Australian version on the far right, if there are some eventfinders are wanting to know what events are going on in Australia when travelling to Australia. All of the links of that section is attractive. This is because of the consistent blue text used and once again the logo of the Eventfinder site is shown with other logos that they support and supported by.
References:
Wysocki, A. F. (2004). The multiple media of texts: How onscreen and paper texts incorporate words, images and other media. In C. Bazerman and P. Prior, (Eds.) What writing does and how it does it: An introduction to analysing texts and textual practices, pp. 123 – 163, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Eribaum
Nielson, J (2007), Writing for the web: Research on how users read on the web and how authors should write their web pages. Retrieved from:
http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting
