Mar 09 2007 at 9:12pm
Great Websites: EDGE of Existence
EDGE of Existence is another example of a great website. Why is this site great? It is cleanly designed and has a very elegant feel. I think that some have taken the clean white look a little too far, but this site balances it well with deep colour accents. The colour choice suits the topic and coordinates with the animal photos.
Speaking of the photos, they are high quality and very engaging. I was immediately drawn to the slideshow on the home page. This is an example of user engagement on an emotional level - you feel the mission of the site when you look at those photos. You can’t help but become involved.
User engagement has been a bit of a theme so far in my Great Websites series. It is very much an intangible quality, and it makes such a huge difference.
The EDGE site also contains a lot of calls to action. There are a lot of opportunities to go deeper into the site. The purpose of the site is made clear in the right sidebar, with graphs and charts illustrating problems and calls to get involved. This reminds me of a recent post on Creating Passionate users about developing a conversation with your users. Usually this would be done with text, but the EDGE site manages to communicate in a conversational way using images and calls to action.
There are some things that could use improvement here. On most of the pages the content gets pushed down below the fold while donation buttons and photos take up most of the prime screen space. The donation button could be placed below the content, especially since most of the content is quite short and there is already a donation button in the right column. That would provide a natural next step after reading the content.
The page design is fixed width and locked to the side of the page – a centered design would make better use of the screen. Another design consideration is the use of graphics to display headers and navigation text. These should be done in plain text so disabled users and search engines can read them better. Sometimes there are too many donation buttons that detract from the content.
All in all, EDGE is a great example of an engaging website. There are many things they have done that we can emulate to make our own sites more engaging.
