WEB WATCH

Joe Zandstra, ECD and vice president, strategy, Qais Consulting

HOT:

Asian Food Channel

4/5
www.asianfoodchannel.com <http://www.asianfoodchannel.com>
 
The Asian Food Channel website is simple, clean and navigable. "Now playing on afc," top shows and recipe search are the three clear doorways on the homepage. The design is fresh and open, with appetizing greens and yellows and a reasonable amount of whitespace around the navigation elements. Video content is appropriately woven throughout the entire site - each show seems to have a piece of video content attached to it, but it's not intrusively presented. One thing I particularly like about this site though is the compactness and consistency. They have kept variation in layout to a minimum, reusing few templates throughout. Now this doesn't just make the site easier to maintain, it helps to focus the attention on the content: the high-quality food and personality imagery. This site avoids needless variety in layout which would do nothing to add to vibrancy - it would simply make the site more confusing and less pleasurable to use.
 

NOT:
Incredible India (Indian Tourism Ministry)

1/5
www.incredibleindia.org <http://www.incredibleindia.org>
 
After seeing the Incredible India TV commercials, you'd expect to click through to an equally impressive website. Unfortunately the gulf between the site and the advertising is huge. The homepage is a sea of endlessly blinking banners, which leaves me with no idea of how to begin the process of uncovering the tourism opportunities of this huge country. The site is clearly the result of too many stakeholders fighting for control over the homepage real estate. They've all managed to get a piece of it, and as a result the user gets nothing. In addition to this, the site suffers from the misguided belief that as many items as possible must be accessible from the homepage - fewer clicks = quicker access to information = better usability. Just take a look at the homepage with its 44 links and its 6 dropdown menus and you'll see why this isn't the case.