Web Site Critique – 9/28
For the website critique I selected the website of Todd Heisler. Heisler is an award-winning photographer currently working for the New York Times, and a photographer whose work I have long admired.
First entering Heisler’s site, you are introduced with a large slideshow with several thumbnails on the left to click through. There is absolutely no text besides his name relative to the size of the thumbnails. I usually don’t come across sites quite like this one in that respect. I have come across plenty of sites that as soon as you enter you are hit with a large slideshow that may have captions, and you have to exit out of the slideshow to see the rest of the site. I have also seen many sites that have a regular slideshow like Heisler’s but simpler navigation.
Above the thumbnails is the capital letter ‘M’, which when clicked on, drops down to show the rest of the menu where you can see several of his collections. For someone like Heisler, who is well known in the photojournalism community, I think that he can get away with making someone search around a little bit for the menu link. However, creating my own site I think I would make my collections easier to get to, and not have you look for them.
Once the menu is dropped down, the site becomes easy to navigate. He has his about section, a ‘links’ section to show his other work and those of his fellow photogs and then 12 different collections that all view the same way that the homepage did with a slideshow and thumbnails on the side.
One other thing that bothered me a bit was navigating back to the homepage. In order to do so, you had to use the navigation menu or the ‘back’ button on the browser. Grant it, his homepage was nothing special, it was just one of his collections, perhaps the most recent, and not a collective slideshow of his work.
His contact information is a fine print at the bottom of every page, along with his copyright information. Again, for someone like Heisler it probably isn’t a bad decision, but if it were me, I would create a separate link in my menu bar so to make it easier for any interested clients.
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Multimedia Critique – http://www.theplaceswelive.com/
One particular multimedia that I recently interacted with was from Magnum titled ‘The Places We Live’ by Jonas Bendiksen. This format of multimedia was different than any other I had ever interacted with, and there were things that I liked and disliked from it. As soon as you enter the site, you are met with images of different area’s and slums around 4 different countries. You are immersed with the images but also the sounds that accompany the images. I had a pretty strong sense of really being there taking the photos myself. Along with the images and sounds, you are also shown several facts about the growing population and how it is affecting people. I thought this was a good way to get the viewer better known about the subjects and situations that they were going to view shortly thereafter.
After the intro, you view a interactive map where you get to click on one of the four countries where you can view 4 different homes and stories of citizens of that particular country. For me, this is where the multimedia project starts loosing its appeal. When you click on one of the persons, you are brought into their home, which is an interactive panorama of the house and the people that live in it. I think the idea is pretty cool, but its not enough, and its very distracting. The whole time I was way too distracted on moving around the house to hear the story of the person living there. Too much going on to pay enough attention to the speaker. Let alone the fact that the audio sounds like a translator reading directly from a page.
I like the interactive feature, but if anything I think that it should be a extra, not the entire piece.
a blog following my fall '11 photo semester 