Animation catches the eyes and makes things noticeable but like sound, animation quickly become trite if it is incorrectly applied (Tay Vaughan, page 285). Although animation adds a visual impact to any website, it has to be used carefully and sparingly to achieve that impact. Besides, a small animation movie has been created in director 8.5 and flash 5 and then it has been converted to a shockwave movie. There are two reasons to convert the director movie to a shockwave movie; the first one is that the shockwave movie is compressed which will reduce the size of the director movie and the second reason due to the most users has a shockwave player. The shockwave movie has been used to draw potential user’s attention to the web site name as well as to display a friendly welcome message.
Picking up the fonts to be used in a website might be fairly difficult from a design standpoint (Tay Vaughan, page 156). Times new Roman has been chosen to be the default font in Orbit Mobiles website since, Times New Roman is one of two fonts that could be seen in all the user’s computers (the first is san-serif like Arial and the second is serif like Times New Roman). Thus, the designer should always plan his/her pages to use just those two fonts to be sure that the website looks the way he/she want it to when it is opened on other user's computers. Text size should not be smaller than 10 point as it can be difficult for many users to read nevertheless, the size should not be bigger than 16 point since it is hard to read whole phrases at a time and it looks unsophisticated. Taking the readability into account, the 12 points was reasonable that most of the users can read it. Heading text has been added to Considerable number of the website pages that it gives the users an idea of the structure of the page content. To avoid putting great deal of text in the page about us, the designer has broken the text into paragraphs that the user can easily read. Furthermore, most of the text does not look like a button or a web link and the text colour contrasts well with the background that it is easy to read against its background. In addition, text which is related to the web links (hyperlink) is standing out by a colour and underlining.
Sound is different in kind from any other digital media that all the other media are visual, being perceived by the eyes, while sound is being perceived by the ears. Furthermore, sound perhaps is the most sensuous and effective element of multimedia that it is meaningful “speech” in any language (Tay Vaughan, page 202). Sounds have been used in both the introduction and the ringtones page. Moreover, the sound which has been used in the introduction page was edited in sound forge 6 to remove an unpleasant part. In the ringtones page, the designer had to put the rintones as a links which are going to be played in the default user player instead of asking the users to download plug-ins that some users do not have the plug-in which is required to hear the sound.
All the media which have been used in the blue multimedia presentation are with permission, the permission is just limited to offline as well as educational issues.
The web site Structure, navigation and the user interface:
It can be seen that the Orbit Mobiles website based on a simple network structure (Mary .E S. Morris and Randy J. Hinrichs, page 137). Besides, the users navigate sequentially from one page to another that all the pages have been created carefully by a natural logic of content. One problem with that kind of the navigation, that the website has no standard navigational concept and as a solution of that; every page has a heading title that users always know where they have been and as a result of this they do not end up retracing their steps. Four hops are the maximum for any user to access any page in the website and two is the maximum to access the important or the commonly accessed pages. In the Sony-Ericsson page, navigation images have been used where the user has to roll his/her mouse over it in order to see different phone cover.
The most eye-catching photograph was chosen as a background interface. The interface consists of a gradient text area in the right which has been used to display all the information, two navigation bars on the top and the bottom and the company logo in the left. The aim of using the logo us to increase the brand name recognition as well as it adds visual appeal to the website. Every page in the Orbit Mobiles website, except the main page contains seven noticeably labeled buttons that each button navigates to a different page in the website.
The designer has been taking into account that the interface design is kept to be simple, clear and clean. One additional consideration that the designer has carefully planned is the browser size. Furthermore, by using java script to adjust the browser size, the website will be always viewing in browser window size 1024 x 768 pixels. Besides, the users who have a computer resolution as 800 x 600 pixels, will be able to view the website but with scroll bar. A lot of content could be seen in the Nokia pages and as a result of this; the content has been break up into three pages instead of crowding one page with all that great deal of content. Besides, instead of putting large phone images, the designer asked the users to click on the phone name or the phone image to view a larger image.
Acceptable testing:
Testing is one of the most important things that any web designer can do (Mary .E S. Morris and Randy J. Hinrichs, page 257). The bulk of the testing should be done before website is exposed to the public that the designer does not want to give the website visitors a bad first impression. Many types of testing have been applied to the Orbit Mobiles web site and they are summarised below:
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Copyedit testing: the designer has checked the spelling, the grammar and the punctuation that finding any copyedit errors will cause of an impression marred by careless distribution of the website.
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Readability and usability testing: the designer has asked some people to navigate through the website and most of them seem to be comfortable when they were viewing the website that they seem to get the designer’s message across. Furthermore, all the people who saw the website agreed that the text is readable.
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Browser and platform Testing : setting the browser size to be 1024 X 768 pixels always was according to the designer mistake , that the designer has used frames instead of lyres . The website has been tested in Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 7.02 and the result was acceptable although, the buttons positions have been moved a little bit in Netscape from their original positions.
Compression between the actual website design and the current website design:
The Orbit Mobiles website is slightly different from the original concept design. While the early stages of designing the website, a blue background colour was used and then it has been placed by the current interface in middle of the design process. Furthermore, the interface layout has been changed many times due to some user’s criticism. Moreover, the reason of replacing the background colour with a background image is that current interface has a limited text area while the original interface has a bigger text area. The actual idea of the navigation structure was a bit different as well from the current navigation. A hierarchical structure was about to be used but it has been replaced with a network structure; that in a practice most websites based on network structure and it is really rarely to find a website which uses hierarchical structure. In addition, to these two previous points, picking up the website colours and the text size were fairly difficult that the presentation’s main colours have been changed several times according to some user’s criticism.
Recommendation if the designer had to start again:
One of the enhancements which are required to improve Orbit Mobiles website is, to provide a home page that it can be seen that the website has no home page and as a result of that, a lot of users get confused. Furthermore, the designer will avoid putting great deal of text as it is really obvious in page About us. Nevertheless, the designer believe that pictures can say thousand words comparing to the text, but the case is slightly different in the Orbit Mobiles website, that the text is required to get the message across especially in the About us and in the phones pages. Eventually, the designer will add more help instructions to the website to guide the user while he/she is viewing website.