http://www.fearsandkahn.co.uk/main.htm
http://www.metroretrofurniture.com/cgi-bin/store.pl?cat=111

These sites are both for companies that sell vintage furniture. The first site, Fears and Kahn better represents the design principles from the reading. The second site, Metro Retro Furniture, decidedly does not.

The homepage for Fears and Kahn is very well done – the page fits into the window and does not require any scrolling. The design is very simple, but well placed. An image of a representative piece of retro furniture draws your eye to the center of the page where the contact information is given. The designer used repetition when he or she placed the links at the top of the page – each one is a circle with letters inside with centered text describing the link underneath. The homepage is nicely laid out and gives the site a good first impression, especially since the designer left plenty of white space to keep the page from seeming crowded.

Once you follow the links, you are brought to pages that are as carefully thought out as the homepage. On the “furniture” page for example, the links from the homepage still appear at the top, but the main focus of the page is the images of the furniture. Repetition is used again – each image appears in a grey outline like the link circles at the top of the page. In this instance, the borders are necessary because they help separate the white backgrounds of the images from the white background of the page. Instead of overloading the page with images, the designer only placed 12 images on each page – you must click an arrow to bring up the next set. This is also useful because it allows the eye to rest on each image before the next set is brought up – sometimes scrolling vertically through a page causes the images to blend into each other, so for a site like these where there are only a few images, this system is helpful. The pages are also free from extra information – the designer placed the emphasis on the furniture, not the price. If you click on one of the images, a pop-up window appears that gives you the information about the piece.

The Metro Retro Furniture website, on the other hand, is terrible. Nothing about the design of the website represents the product. Nearly all of the text appears in Times New Roman and in arbitrary colors, which does nothing to provide contrast. There is barely anything on the page and yet you still need to scroll down to see the poorly organized information. The other pages are as poorly designed as the homepage. To see an actual piece of furniture, you have to click on at least two links. There are no pictures to indicate which link to choose. To use this website, you must be looking for a specific brand and style, which as a consumer, I can tell you is not common when searching for vintage furniture. The text of the page is emphasized over the images – which is extremely problematic because it is much easier to determine if you want to buy the furniture by looking at it rather than reading about it. Many of the individual pages for the furniture are laid out in a table, which is extremely distracting and makes the page seem even more cluttered than it really is.

The irony of this situation is, however, that when shopping for vintage or antique items, the best tactic is to look for the website that is cluttered or poorly designed. As a consumer, you want to look for the people who don’t seem to know what they’re doing – a professional-looking website means professional furniture sellers, which means that they know exactly how much their furniture is worth, so you probably won’t get much of a discount.