Week 4B - Aesthetics, Design, and Branding

The first website I chose to talk about is a Hungarian news website https://index.hu/. I visit this site quite often to find out about the latest news back in Hungary. Besides the quality of the posts, the website also has a user friendly design. It is really easy to navigate on this site. Every page has their logo in the top left corner, clicking which takes you to the home page. Links to all their main topics are listed under the logo in a header row, which is visibly separated from the content with an orange line. On the left side of the homepage there are up and down arrows, clicking which takes you to their partner portals. They also have a search function, and one-click access to the latest news listed by date and time. References in an article to other articles are hyperlinked to the other article for one-click access. After you read a news item you can find a list of related articles from the past at the bottom of the page.  

The site uses the concept of hierarchy very well. The most important and the most recent news is highlighted with a large picture a bold large-type headline. Only headlines (sometimes with a short synopsis) are visible for smaller and older news. Every page is easy to read due to the right size of fonts used by the website. Although the opening page is a bit busy, individual article pages are airy, easy to read and follow. The paragraphs are short and their main point is highlighted with a black background and bold white text. With the easy navigation and well designed pages, this website helps me get information quickly and painlessly.

My second choice was a website which I use quite often with my Hungarian students https://cooljugator.com/. This website is a free tool for conjugating verbs in many different languages. The opening page of the website is very simple. They have the list of all the languages presented as clickable buttons. Underneath the list is a short description of the website. And in the footer, you can find the list of the languages one more time and links to other areas such as about us, feedback, contact us, and the conjugation game. What I like about this website is that nothing takes the focus away from the language buttons. Then when you pick a language, the first thing at the top of the page is a search box which says “Type verb to conjugate”. Under that, to make life even easier, there is a list of the most commonly used verbs, and a link to all the verbs available. When you pick your verb, you will see the conjugation in a clean tabular format. To use this website and find the right information is super easy. There are a few things I would change, though. One, I would move the link to the game out form the footer because it is hidden away, but it is a great tool and deserves a more prominent location. Another is that on the opening page of a certain language, there is description of that language. I would try to break the description into smaller paragraphs, and maybe give descriptive headings to each of them to help the reader.