Websites are a crucial part of a business, especially in this time and era when most consumers prefer the availability of information instantly. The website creates more traffic, continuous marketing and acts as the company’s online office. To develop an outstanding website, the company’s or outsourced designers must incorporate the following elements; Overall layout and visuals should be carefully designed and selected to suit the intended purpose, color themes should be consistent both with the fonts and logo design. Navigation is an important component too; users should be able to easily surf through your website and get the needed information. Powerful content should be included for search engine optimization and finally, the website should be user-friendly and mobile-friendly for enhanced visibility, (Bernacki, Blazejczyk & Indyka-Piasecka, 2016). This paper seeks to compare and contrast the following elements of web design; proximity, contrast, repetition, and alignment for the websites of the national football league and major baseball league.
Proximity is the element of web design that demands good organization of information with grouping of related elements for easy identification and traceability to save time for the user. National football league implemented the white space technique properly as seen in their website. The organization of elements is well done for both websites for example teams, watch, tickets and shop are related elements and they are arranged in close proximity in the two websites. NFL’s website used a well and related visual hierarchy unlike while still maintaining enough amount of white space between content,
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Figure 1.0: National football league’s website. The website shows proximity at the arrangement of header elements https://www.nfl.com/ . Proper use of white space is also evident in the picture above
However, unlike the MLB’s website which used an enormous amount of texts in their white space, this affected the attractiveness of the site but the proximity of elements in this site is well done.
Figure 2.0: shows the site of major league baseball; the close proximity of the elements in header elements is incredible, especially under the news element; the sub-elements are grouped well. However, the use of the whit space and visuals is poorly done. https://www.mlb.com/
Alignment is used to create a structure, arrangement elements and create a connection between them. This component of web design contributes to the user's ability of the website and rids of clutter on the website. There is even distribution of visual elements in NFL’s website which are arranged horizontally; for example, the what’s trending, more draft and more highlight visuals
Figure 3.0: Shows NFL’s site with a horizontal alignment of elements with a clear differentiation of elements. NFL’s website alignment factors in the aspect of element arrangement, structure creation and connection-based from this arrangement; what’s trending (current news), 2020 NFL draft, all-decade team, NFL full games, this creates some structure which enables users to navigate properly, https://www.nfl.com/ .
However, in comparison to MLB’s alignment structure which takes a vertical arrangement with most of the elements being links to several current and past news while MLB’s website has a lot of cluttering with enormous use of texts in their alignment structure with few visuals. The NFL website is more user-friendly than MLB. Major league baseball league’s website cluttering is witnessed by the poor visual hierarchy and too much-unorganized content.
Figure 4.0: shows MLB’s site with a vertical alignment of elements, however excess use of texts alters the benefits of white space, unlike NFL’s site which used its white space properly by implementing a horizontal alignment. https://www.mlb.com/
Repetition is a design element that involves consistent repetition of visual elements on the website to create emphasis and enhance user ability. Elements that can be repeated in a web design process include; colors, shapes, texture, fonts, typography, and videos. Repetition gives users a sense of recognition and good interaction with the website. NFL’s website has good use of the same font for all the visual, their titles are all in bold. Consistent repetition of blue color theme in the header elements, logo and the on the texts in the site layout.
Figure 5.0: NFL’s website shows repetitive use of blue color theme in the logo, header background and on the texts as shown in the schedule element. This creates a good user experience. https://www.nfl.com/ .
MLB’s site on the contrary, have different fonts for the latest news section, visuals, and the header. The irregular use of repetition alters user experience and easy navigation on the MLB website compared to the NFL’s website who is likely to create an amazing user experience. The two websites have even distribution and repetitive use of their logo in their layouts; this creates emphasis and prompts users to visualize these logos. while MLB’s website has inconsistent use of font and typography style spread across the entire layout of the website
Figure 6.0: MLB’s site shows poor use of repetition from the blue color theme in the header, red in some texts titles and sky-blue in some. Lack of repetition makes the website fail to direct the user on to the right elements to focus on. https://www.mlb.com/
Contrasting art of designing entails differentiating designing elements from each other to allow the most important elements to stand out; this arouses attention from users to draw their attention to the most specific elements which stand out on the website. Both NFL’s and MLB’s websites have the same color emphasis on the elements on their headers which have the following elements; news, scores, schedule, standings, tickets, shop have a color borrowed from their logos. The background color puts more emphasis on where the users should visit first.
Figure 7.0 NFL’s site shows the emphasized use of blue color theme. This creates a contrast and directs the user to focus on the header elements as most of the information can be accessed there. https://www.nfl.com/
NFL’s website implemented the use of font size well to differentiate between the header elements and other sub-elements on the layout; for example, for the header, color use created a contrast, on the sub-elements bold and capital characters to create a clear; contrast on the contrary MLB’s failed to apply contrast in their body layout of the website, font size is almost the same all characters, this fails to provide some differentiation and direct the users’ attention.
Figure 8.0: Looking at the major league baseball’s site above; contrasting themes of color has been used in body texts and the header elements. However, a user is likely to click “winner’s tears changed history” or “coronavirus information” and forego the header elements where it contains the main information of the site. https://www.mlb.com/
In conclusion, national football league utilized the use of contrast, alignment, proximity, repetition, and visuals used to create a user-friendly website while major league baseball employed some few aspects of contrast, proximity, repetition, and alignment; it failed, however, to utilize effectively the art of contrast and avoid cluttering. Website designing is an important investment a company should invest in. A good website contributes to brand identity, brand awareness, and marketing in the long run. All these benefits eventually contribute immensely to brand growth, recognition and market increase.
References
Bernacki, Jaroslaw, et al. "Responsive Web Design: Testing Usability of Mobile Web Applications." Asian Confrence on Intelligent Information and Database Systems . Ed. N T Nguyen, et al. Berlin: Springer, 2016. 257-269.
National Football League ( 2020) Retrieved from https://www.nfl.com/
Major League Baseball (2020) Retrieved from https://www.mlb.com/
