In our recent discussions of usability of websites, I can’t
help but want to critique the website of Pine Lake Pastures, where I take horse
riding lessons. The site, www.pinelakepastures.com, does not
violate many of the top ten no-no’s that we learned about, but it does have a
lot of ambiguity, typo errors, and things that just plain don’t make sense.
More questions are raised in the site’s “The Herd” and “For Sale” sections. “Slider”, a horse, is listed in both sections. Slider’s age is not listed however in the “For Sale” posting, and as I look at the posting of him in “The Herd” section, it says he is ten years old and the post was written in March, 2012. That means that Slider is really now 11 years old and so her posting is miss-leading if the reader pays no attention to the date it was posted. Furthermore, an interested buyer that perhaps saw him in the “For Sale” section would not know the horse’s age unless they stumbled upon him in “The Herd” section as well. It is my opinion that these small issues do affect the site’s usability because a reader is not able to obtain a clear answer while browsing the two sections of the site.
(Please note: The last three pictures in this post will not let me enlarge them as the first one has. I am perplexed by this and have fought with "Blogger" for a while now trying to make them bigger. I give up. Perhaps one could argue about the usability of this site?)
I have been going to Cheri for several weeks now for riding
lessons, and have been trying to figure out how to someday mention to her that
I am going to school for Technical Communication, and I could help spruce up
her web page for her. How does one make
such a suggestion without hurting someone’s feelings and undermining their
education or sense of concern for detail regarding their business?
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