The main goal of Apple’s website is, like almost all businesses’ main goal, to make money. This is evidenced by the site’s structure, which emphasizes their products beneficial features and makes it convenient to purchase them. The website also has a secondary goal of postpurchase support, offered in its support section. A user who has just purchased a MacBook can find helpful information regarding troubleshooting and efficiency in this section, but might get confused and head over to the Mac section of the website first, which contains no support and only promotional material.
Facebook’s login page has the functional specifications expected of any login page. Firstly, it includes a login tab at the top for users who already have an account, prompting the user for an Email or Phone number and Password. The tab also has a “Forgot account?” link for recovery. For new users, the page also has a complete sign up section, which requires Name, Phone / Email, Password, Birthday, and Sex. This section also includes Terms and Policy links, and a link to create an account for a non-personal entity such as a business. This page also includes options for different languages, and a plethora of links to other pages such as Instagram, Help, Create an Ad, and Games.
The four architectural approaches to information structure are hierarchical, matrix, sequential, and organic. An example of a hierarchical website would be a messageboard or forum, where subforums exist by category, and different threads exist underneath subforums. An example of a matrix structure would be an online shopping site such as Amazon, where items exist under multiple categories and navigation reaches out in multiple directions; while the site conceptually has a hierarchical structure, related and recommended items as well as multicategorical listings give Amazon a matrix architecture. Examples of organic websites are difficult to find – Since most websites are designed to make money and help users, an organic structure is often impractical from a functional standpoint. Organic sites are generally experimental or for entertainment value, or in some cases accidentally organic because of poor design. An example of an organic interaction would be a text adventure. In a text adventure, you can generally only navigate to those nodes that are immediately adjacent to yours – there is no hierarchy including a home button or categories. It’s an organic progression through the maze of the game. An example of a sequential system is just about any payment processing system – the one for Amazon, for example. Once you’ve proceeded to checkout, you’re on rails until the end.
Huffington Post’s index page is nearly 90% content as far as screen space goes – the majority of the space is taken up by the flagship story of the day. However, clicking on the hamburger menu at the top left flips this completely, bringing out a navigation menu that takes up nearly the whole screen depending on resolution. Google’s index page, functionally, is 100% navigation. If you take into consideration the Google Logo, and the occasional Google Doodle, this drops to around 60% – 80% navigation. Google is a search engine, and is designed to be mostly navigation. While the average Wikipedia page is almost entirely content, the index page is mostly navigation, giving language options and a search bar above the fold, with links to external sites below. Etsy’s index page has a modest navigation bar at the top, however the rest of the page is both content and navigation at once – small snippets of content that navigate to larger individual pages of that content.
The first thing you see on Landor’s landing page is what seems to be their mission statement, large, contrasting, left justified, and relatively alone. Besides the unintrusive navigation at the top and the background image, it’s the only thing above the fold. The user needs to scroll down or click on the nav to see any other content besides this statement. Scrolling down presents the user with a list of recent news articles and works, each of which takes up their own page despite being nothing but headlines and brief descriptions. Clicking on the nav / hamburger menu occupies the entire screen with uncluttered navigation – categories such as Work and About Us are presented left justified in large font and is the first thing the eye catches, whereas links to individual projects are presented right justified in small font.