zyra.org

Zyra

This site is ridiculous. Let's go over a few reasons why. First, please read the tagline on Zyra.org's homepage, and the purple paragraph beneath it.

One of my least favorite things is having to scroll 3 feet to get to the bottom of a page. Some blogs, classified ads, and message boards contain tolerable scrolling, but it does not work for Zyra. Zyras extensive scrolling becomes a clear violation of the rule of proximity; you cannot get a feel for this site by glancing at any one of its pages. It possesses an almost anti-hierarchical quality.

I cannot tell what the important elements are, can you? That is largely because there is no contrast. The text is a hodge-podge of medium-sized sans-serif, serifed, italic, bold, uppercase fonts....ad nauseam. Zyra's use of every conceivable neon color is actually kind of amazing. I'm afraid that this does not create contrast or focus, but it does create a headache for the user.

In terms of alignment, this page contains extreme left and right alignment. The content runs the full width of the page. I find this to be very hard to deal with.

The repetition of this page lies in its vast use of complete nonsense. In other words, I can find no discernible repetition. This is a problem for a website that *wants* to be an index of information.

Two more fun things:

1. You are encourage by Zyra to use the site as your homepage. Ha!!
2. You should try running an online sitemap generator to try see the "wholeness/effectiveness" of your own bad site. Try this one: sitemapdoc.com. It's fun to find broken links and duplicate content on reputable sites! (I must say the sitemapdoc has a pretty poor visual layout as well, but their service has been helpful to me, even though they will only scan (spider) 500 pages. When I scanned Zyra.org, I was surprised that Zyra only had one page of duplicate content...and no errors! Perhaps a rhetorical re- visioning could make Zyra first-rate!