Week 1 Technical Blog
I suppose the three websites that I visit most have what's called a dashboard-type layout where the most interesting information is displayed at a glance on a kind of headsup display. By far the most interesting is displayed centrally in a large panel in such a way to draw your eyes immediately to it. Then less important is organized in discrete areas in one or two sidebars.
Gmail is, of course, the main way to communicate electronically for me with e-mail replacing most of traditional postal mail communications. Gmail has evolved over time, but now it is optimized for filtering messages into different folders and labelling. The list of messages comprises the main panel of the page and is essentially the payload of the website. The single sidebar on the left offers quicklinks to different folders that contain different sets of e-mail messages. Also there is an integrated Gtalk section for instant messaging with other Gmail users. The header has account controls and links, search bar, and more links for even more common folders with tab-like buttons, such as social media mail, and marketting e-mail. This makes it easy to move around my messages. Before my more critical messages would get buried in a sea of special offers and social media notifications that I was already aware of from checking those sites, but now with things segregated, I get the urgent mail at a glance as intended so I no longer waste any time here. The other mail hasn't gone away though and if I want to see it, I just need to switch mail tabs. Though it has a business-like appearance, it is very clearly for the everyday end user.
Even though it has rivals, Facebook is now the second most common way I communicate with people since it is where people open a window into their lives to share with their friends. The structure is much the same as Gmail with quicklinks to different friend lists, groups, pages, and apps on the left sidebar while there is a search bar and controls up top and the main content being a news feed is centrally located in a large, scrollable panel. There are also right sidebars now for instant messaging and certain notifications along with other things, but it is more or less the same format as Gmail. Some critial details are different though. Facebook has a distinctive blue color scheme and is clearly designed more for play than business. I do spend more time here than I do on Gmail, but that's because I want to spend time here interacting with people and the quicklinks makes it easy to look up details friends have chosen to share from their lives and plan for things like birthdays. Unlike Gmail where messages are strictly sorted by date in descending order, Facebook allows you to sort stories in the news feed by importance so they don't get lost in, say, a number of baby pictures.
The last website I spent a lot of time on is the fan site Gopher Puck Live. Again things are in a little different place than the other sites, but for the most part it is again in roughly the same layout. Now there is a huge difference in the color scheme matching the school colors of the University of Minnesota, as this is a fan site for the varsity hockey programs. There's also a dark areas surrounding the portal that's meant to make the site still look elegant in different browser window sizes since the portal is designed to be a fixed size and the dark color immediatly draws your eyes to the light colored panels where all the message board threads and links are located. Pulldown menus with even more common links are also prominent here. Though Gmail and Facebook also have them, they play a larger role here helping visitors navigate to other parts of the site.
In conclusion the dashboard approach is what is favored to make people feel comfortable visiting websites. Color scheme helps maintain specific feeling as well as provide distinctive looks, but for the most part, people are looking for the most important information to be large and obvious and quicklinks to be off to the side, but close at hand.