Sample Web Evaluation

Community Resources for Independent Living
http://www.cril-online.org/

This is a fairly simple site, describing the organization and its services.  With some simple changes it could be a far more effective site for the organization.  We evaluated four different areas of the site and made notes about our observations:

Functionality

• The menu is a bit crowded, all black and becomes somewhat hard to read
  The user interface is consistent - navigation on the left, content on the right.
• Once you’re into the site, it’s easy to lose track of where you’ve come from.  Breadcrumbs would solve this.
• The site should contain universal bottom navigation with their contact info for accessibility and ease-of-use

Marketing Sense/Appeal

• There really is no marketing appeal except for the logo and header
• It would be good to see design elements that call out the different sections of the site.
• This site needs imagery – there’s no sense of who the organization serves, no warmth
• There were “calls to action” or anything to entice the user to dig deeper into the site.

Use of Color/Fonts

• The colors are great, but they are not widely used at all
• The site comes across as “bland” with no real personality, no tone/feeling
• Fonts are basic, but there is no real "tone of voice" because of this
• All of the screen fonts are black on a white background which is sometimes hard on the eye on a screen – shades of dark gray are more effective – increasing usability

Content Architecture

• The information is a bit hard to decipher. There is no clear direction on what information is more important than other info.
• The overall information layout feels "Heavy" - meaning that it feels like there is a lot of info that the viewer needs to wade through before they find what they need.
• We recommend having "Services" as a main nav feature, rather than having to dig for it in the “What We Do section.”  Services is a large enough section to merit its own navigation link.

Recommendations

As mentioned, this is a pretty basic site.  If there were money in this organization’s budget, we’d recommend a complete update with look and feel as well as content architecture.  If there were only money to make some moderate changes to increase the overall usability and marketing appeal of the site, the following steps should be taken:

1. Change the font color to darker gray, rather than black
2. Incorporate some imagery throughout the site
3. Incorporate the ability to donate online using “calls to action” throughout the site for donations
4. Evaluate the navigation/content structure to determine if any changes are needed and re-structure as appropriate
5. Incorporate breadcrumbs (e.g.,  Home > Programs > School Readiness )
6. The site needs to be optimized for ADA compatibility as well as search engine friendliness

These are preliminary recommendations and are not based on conversation with the organization to determine its overall website objectives.

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