Module 3+4 Second Post

In amazon, contact information is only available to members, from what I could determine. It doesn’t list a webmaster, as it’s big enough to afford an in-house web team. No geographic location is listed for amazon, as it is online-only.

There is no text option. Or, if there is, it is nowhere I could find, and I’ve been going to this site for years. The text is a clearly legible sans serif font, decent-sized, against a white background. Rather web 1.0, but readable, and not intimidating. The links are blue text, and as such are easily discernible from regular text.

Most CD’s have audio samples, and the quality is about a B- level. The designers seem to be trying to accommodate all levels of users.

I would definitely not call this web 2.0, but I would hesitate to call it web 1.0, either. Maybe 1.5? The white background, the black text, the blue hypertext; all these are pretty last-generation. But the design has been updated; the navigation is a pop-up style window in addition to the traditional menu bar. If it is web 1.0, it’s the best web 1.0 out there I know of.

The site does require plug-ins. Since I downloaded them so long ago, I can’t remember specifically, but I believe it requires java, and realplayer for the audio files. These are the only options. As mentioned before, the designers are definitely trying to accommodate viewers with older machines, or ones with less experience on the web, and since you can tell your browser to download plug-ins automatically, it’s a pretty user-friendly site. Newcomers should have no problem finding what they need. Any improvements that could be made would be in the areas of shortening and simplifying the department homepages, and maybe removing all the extra stuff at the bottom of the page that no one looks at. It would save on load times an cut down on bandwidth usage, which would be especially helpful this time year. Last Christmas, they shipped something in the neighborhood of nearly 100 million orders.