Journal week 6
For this weeks journal, I decided to review Healthline.com, a web site meant to connect people to better health through informational resources. Just by first going to this site I could tell that it had an extremely large amount to cover. Any health web site automatically has a lot to touch upon concerning information. Due to this overwhelming amount of data, it could be difficult to organize into one web site. Healthline.com seems to have done an excellent job with this, however. The web site is clear and easy to view when first opened. The large font at the top posing the question, "How can we help you today?" is very eye catching, and immediately gives the viewer a place to type in a question or statement and look for support. I really liked how easy it was to find this search box. No searching or scanning around for help, instead it is literally impossible to miss. Right off the bat, this web site is very well organized.
In addition to the nice organizational piece, Healthline.com did a fantastic job utilizing pictures to keep the text from becoming too overwhelming. Instead of simply having sentence after sentence of information, they did a really nice job breaking it up with images of common objects that we can relate to and understand. For example, next to the line "Dirtiest places in your home" is a picture of dishes stacked in a kitchen sink. Not only does this give us something interesting to look at that we understand, it helps to balance out the ratio between text and images. This helps the web site be much more esthetically pleasing. Instead of going to a site and being bombarded with small text in paragraph after paragraph, Healthline.com keeps it much simpler and thereby less overwhelming. I, for one, am much more likely to click on a link that is accompanied with a small image, versus a link that is described by a paragraph of text.
I also found that at the bottom of the page, there is a box containing "Featured Topic Centers." This is a very helpful asset for a website, and I commend Healthline.com for having a featured topic section. In doing so, they help viewers find what they are looking for much more quickly. In addition, if someone is simply browsing the site and not looking for anything in particular, the featured topic section could help them find an interesting article. This also helps with the organization of the web site by sorting information into more containers. It could be part of the reason why you do not have to scroll very much to view the entire page, another big plus, and kudos to Healthline.com for being able to layout the information in such a manner so minimal scrolling is required.
Overall, this web site was very nicely designed. I would highly recommend someone go here for medical information, or even if they are just looking to learn some interesting facts. I would even go as far as put it on WebMD's level. The one, tiny, tiny piece that I may suggest be changed, is to make some of the small font larger, or bolder. Do to the fact that a large amount of people going to this web site will be elderly, it would be beneficial to have an easily readable font. We don't want to have to squint! That's all for now folks.
http://www.healthline.com
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