For my second web review, I chose to review the Pest Stop Boys website.
https://www.peststopboys.co.uk/
The Pest Stop Boys’ website uses an excessive amount of colors and animation. While it certainly is impressive how they can add all of these effects in CSS, it is overdone to an extent and makes the information hard to read. In the website’s defense, however, there is little information that is actually needed to be shared. The website offers a quick introduction and ends with the contact information, all in a very large font. This would be more understandable if the text didn’t have animations when hovered over, making it extremely more distracting. Aside from the readability issues, however, the website is an excellent work of art and utilizes advanced CSS features well.
Like mentioned in the second chapter of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, color is very important to a composition. This also applies to websites. The website here uses an extremely diverse set of colors, though it does well to incorporate value as well, as it separates dark colors from the bright colors. The cursor is a blob of inverted color, where everywhere the cursor is placed, the colors are inverted. This makes an interesting effect that is not extremely distracting, due to the small size of the blob. As for texture, this website uses simple colors without any texture or gradients. While texture does help a website immensely, this website works well without a large use of it. The minimalism mixed with the large selection of colors makes up for the lack of texture and gradients.
The navigation of this website is extremely simple. It is a relatively small scroll from the top of the page to the bottom, and all information is aligned in a similar way. As mentioned on page 34 of Don’t Make Me Think, the most important information should be more prominent. This does not always mean larger, but it should definitely stand out. This website does an excellent job of displaying what is especially important. Phrases such as “we stop” before “insects” and “contact us” before the contact information are made smaller because they really are not as important as the content following them. For instance, once someone sees phone numbers and emails and other information, they will often not need to think to know that it is contact information. The website is straight to the point in this regard, making the user’s trip quick and interesting. As such, this website can be scanned rather easily and the point is made very clear and understandable.
In a general review of the website, it works very well as a composition. The advanced yet not extremely overwhelming effects of this website show a great level of expertise and may reflect on the work of the Pest Stop Boys themselves. It is overwhelming in some aspects, however. The “Our mission” statement is on a lower contrast background, and all of the text is animated, making it majorly distracting. The color changes when hovering over text, as well as the movement of the text itself, may be disorienting as well. Despite that, the website still leaves a good impression on the viewer, marking a very good website, with the mentioned flaws being distractions that prevent it from reaching perfection.