Chicago Coast Volleyball
Mon, Aug 10, 2009
Health & Sports | Author: bpeh
Introduction
Are you a fan of volleyball? Have you heard of Chicago Coast? chicagocoast.com is the official website of the Chicago Coast Volleyball Club Team. I thought the site is above average considering the fact that it is quite unknown to everyone. Many clubs don’t even have a proper website!
Form
The design looks straight forward. The blue menus and the yellow logo contrasted really well. What caught me though was the spotlight player on the left menu. His image was definitely misaligned. The title for all the pages is abit distracting as mouseover shows a change of color but doesn’t do anything; Most people would expect a hyperlink if there are mouseover effects.
Function
The section I like best is the “highlight” section (see fig 1). The video is clear and I believe this is a good attempt by the author to make the site more interesting. The other sections are OK and to be honest, they look abit boring. Some links on the left menu doesn’t work as well.
I also noticed that the top menu and footer have exactly the same links. That makes the footer redundant (see fig 2). How about a sitemap?
Conclusion
chicagocoast.com looks like a typical fan/club website that was built using dreamweaver. I like to give a plus point to the video section though. Perhaps it is the intention of the author to keep the site simple and clean. What might help though is to add more graphics. For example, instead of having one big image, use a few small ones. Make the site look abit busier! It looks dead quiet at the moment.
fig 1. Video highlights
fig 2. Footer same as header
Popularity: 5% [?]
August 11th, 2009 at 9:50 am
hey thanks for the review!
I plan on taking your criticisms to heart and work on improving my site. The first change I plan on making is on the flash text on each page. I plan on removing that entirely and replacing it with a graphic image. I used that flash text initially to allow me to use the specific font I wanted for the page headings. you can see this currently on the highlight page.
I’ll think about removing the footer links. Although I figured they’d come in handy on pages that users were required to scroll down. That way they wouldn’t have to scroll back up to choose another link, they could just click the link on the bottom. However, I do see the redundancy.
I never knew what to put on the main page, perhaps I can make a photo montage or something. I thought about a flash movie but some people find that annoying on web pages.
Thanks again for reviewing my site. I hope you enjoyed watching the videos!
August 15th, 2009 at 11:35 am
i agree, the home page looks quite normal.