Engrish.com is a website that compiles pictures on grammatical mistakes people make around the world on their signs, CDs, even beverages…you name it. There are two navigation systems on the home page. One is more broad, consisting of four links, whereas the other one Is a list of “Engrish Categories.” The make perfect sense, because it is aiming to narrow down the archive of “Engrish-worthy” material that they have on the website. There is a hierarchy among the navigation systems because the main one is arranged in a tab-like manner, whereas the secondary links are acting as if they are on the page, accessible once you open up the file, which most likely has tabs. These two navigation links remain throughout the website, while the only thing changing is the photos. Everything else pretty much stays the same, and the only major change I realize is that sometimes they have long banner-like ads on top of the page, scrunching down everything else that could be seen without it. Upon clicking a link, for the main navigation link, there is a rollover and a selected state, whereas the secondary links that are on the left-hand side of every page only has a rollover state. Because of this, it is not always clear where you are within the architecture of the site. Going back to the homepage is never a problem since one of the main tabs acting as a navigation link is “Home”, and remains there no matter which webpage you visit. The site does appear to have a deep architecture, despite the fact that they put most of their photos on one page where you scroll to browse through them. This because of the archives they have on the website. The architecture is flat in that you can really access any page within the site, and for a website that has a lot of photos, this would be desirable, coming from the perspective of someone who likes to share the hilarious-ness of some “Engrish” material. The hierarchy of the typography is apparently in that they use contrast, weight, size, and alignment. They used a lot of techniques, but I don’t necessarily think they executed it in the best possible way (or ways). I would clean up the alignment and have it make more sense; as of current, there is an indent for the date, and slight indent for the headline, and then the story, which is not indented in at all.
The labels of the navigation links are very clearly labeled, and due to the nature of the website, the focal point of any page is a photo. There are some times where the logo is very distracting. It is very bright, and does not really emanate a hilarious atmosphere. It seems more like a website a teenaged-girl would regularly visit for gossip and such rather than for humor. The photos definitely add to the website, but there are times when I have felt some sensory overload. I would remedy this by changing the logo of Engrish.com to something not so flashy.
This website uses a lot of icons, but they are very conventional, such as the envelope for emailing someone the particular picture, facebook, twitter, dig, and much more. On any given page, There are really three colors used, with different shades added to generate more variety and livelihood to the page rather than just boring, solid colors. I am really not sure why these colors were chosen (white, blue, and red). They sound patriotic, but the website does not look like so. The only reasoning I could come up with was the fact that they wanted to people to formulate a lighter opinion on Engrish: Engrish didn’t want to get criticism for being too harsh or mean, and hence tried their hand at altering the market perception of their website.
The objective of this website is just to humor people and realize how people who don’t speak your native language are bound to make mistakes. It does have a search function, which is pretty useful and accurate, going into the archived files also. I have been visiting this website for a long time, and although this logo change is quite a surprise, I still nonetheless enjoy the content it provides and, as a frequent visitor, do not remember or have any confusions on this website.
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