As a group member involved in the build-up of a web-site, I had to evaluate two other web-sites that are currently offering the same service that we intend to offer. I have therefore decided to evaluate and review the official web-site of the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) and the INFO 2000 web-site.

I will evaluate both these sites with regards to the following areas:

• Graphics
• Animations
• Sounds

• Use of Colours
• Navigation

• Information

The DETR is quite a good site, but I feel that this is only if you are a patient browser, as you will often find yourself dwelling very deep into information that you did not originally intend to find. This can become very tedious and stressful, as the information seems to be accessible through picture icons, but once you’re through to the area you want, the information is not what you originally wanted and therefore misleading.

This information is also very crammed and is not produced to the reader in ‘an easy to read’ manner. This also means that you’ll find yourself searching deeper into this information and usually to no avail.

There is no use of any multimedia within the site, which is a good and a bad thing. It is good as this means that the site is a lot quicker to load up, but bad as it looks very dull and boring. The design of the site is quite dull and very plain, with exception for the main home page, which has quite nice descriptive picture icons as links to other parts of the site.

This site attempts to offer the reader information on the year 2000, but fails miserably. I found it very hard to actually find much information regarding the millennium, as it is more dedicated to prompting different companies based in the United States of America. This was quite irrelevant, as I wanted to know more about things that would have some relevance to our own site.

Graphically, it is quite impressive and makes good use of consistency throughout. There is also some nice animation, which highlights the search engine very well.

Overall both these site were quite poor in the presentation of there information. The DETR has quite a lot of information but relies heavily on the user to browse the site fully, and Info 2000 was quite thin on the information that I was actually looking for. Graphically however, Info 2000 is very nice and has a comfortable feel to it, which is down to the warm colours that it utilises whereas the DETR is very bland and boring looking, and finds it hard to keep the user attracted for long enough.