Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Website Evaluation: Above & Beyond Balloons

The website I found is www.advertisingballoons.com , the website for Above & Beyond Balloons which is a company that sells advertising balloons, blimps, inflatable’s and more. At first glance I felt the website was going to be pretty bad, but it does have some good attributes.

The website was complete, all the pages worked as well as their internal links. The website has a title: Advertising, Balloons, Inflatables, RC Blimps, Searchlights – Above&Beyond. It’s a long title, but at least they have one. Above & Beyond Balloon’s key audiences are companies who need an advertising gimmick or are planning an event.

There wasn’t much on the authority of the website. I’m pretty sure one of the company’s employees constructed the website, it doesn’t look professionally done. So I would have to say the creator would be Above & Beyond Balloons and their credibility is as a company. There is a contact tab which includes the company’s phone number, email address and physical address. They also have an online order/interest form to give them and idea of what a prospective customer wants. The sites domain is good for the company, it is an explanation of what they do.

The presentation of the website is not professional looking. It looks like something a child would create. It has a lot of cheesy aspects such as the flashing clipart and text. It is also very busy which makes it a little difficult to navigate. The navigation bar itself was also strange, it worked but looked like you were dropping down a tab in word. There were a lot of relevant pictures but there were a lot of unnecessary ones as well. Although the presentation is lacking, the grammar and content is good.

I think the site might be older because of the source code. The creator didn’t use a style sheet and used some old tags, no divs, which is another reason I figured it was an amateur. I found this website through a link Google brought up when I searched “ugly websites”. It was a link for an ugly website contest, so I lucked out!

Above & Beyond’s website needs a little makeover but the content fits perfectly with what they are trying to do, sell their stuff. If I were to give them one piece of advice it would definitely be to de-clutter the site.

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