Proceed with caution

http://havenworks.com/

Every aspect of this site is a nightmare, right down to the title that includes a ;-) winky face. It touts itself as a “haven” for local, national and international news regarding everything from accounting to genealogy to sports, but the site is hard to glance at let alone read or scroll through.

1. To say the site overuses color is an understatement. The top of the page alternates between a different colored background (or background within a background) and a white background. Most of the many, many, many links are either tiny colorful icons followed by text, or just the icons themselves (which is another issue altogether). Some of the text links (Secrets, TV Weblog) use a different color for each letter in the word.

2. The site uses a lot of hyperlinked icons and pictures without accompanying text or text that appears upon a mouse over. It’s hard to determine what a lot of the icons stand for and what section of the site they will link you to. In the blue vertical navigation column most of the hyperlinked pictures are blurry or pixilated, and while some of them are familiar, it’s not clear what all of them are or even whether they will direct you to a completely different site or stay within havenworks.com. The picture links in the horizontal bar labeled “Republican News” are inconsistent: some of them are pictures, others are maps, another is clipart of a bear. Half of the pictures have the blue box around them that indicates a link, while the other half do not. Consistency on this site is certainly lacking.


3. There is virtually no white space on this site. Text and icons fill up the entire page from left to right and top to bottom. There isn’t really spacing between the rows at the top or the columns below. Depending on the resolution of your screen, some of the text even overlaps other text that is clearly meant to be separated by boxes surrounding the distinct sections.

4. There are way too many typefaces going on throughout the page. Some of the news stories use a serif font while others use a sans serif. Nothing is really uniform in they way the site uses typefaces, weight, size or alignment of text.


5. The overall setup of the site (spacing, text, links, color, etc.) makes it difficult to determine the hierarchy of the information it’s presenting to the viewer. The lack of hierarchy is also due to the incredible volume of information and text the site presents on the homepage. It takes a minute (literally) to get to the bottom of the page and without consistent use of color, typeface and font size it’s hard to pick out the important words or headlines at a glance.