As soon as I opened the page I am greeted with strong, bright and vibrant colours that catches the viewers eyes. Rather then the main menu strong imagery from the film itself is the first thing I see, straight away it makes me aware that the page is advertising a film. Giving the users an option to choose what country they are from (giving the site a well-built audience) I was able to enter the main website. A short and quite amusing animation is shown of the main character which sets the scene of the main page so, the interactivity has already started before I had even opened the website. The main site kept to the theme of the film using the same theme of animation to the motion picture. The layout is easy to the viewer’s eye and sets a scene to the genre of the movie. In most of my opinions I would usually say that text should be inserted however on this site I sense that it works better without text, reason for this is because the imagery is so powerful that there us no need for wording.
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As this websites main target audience is at a younger age I found it user friendly however even though the introduction to the website was attractive to the eye I found a lack of instructions on how to work /navigate through the pages. Even though it is really just common sense to navigate around a website it still took me some time to work out that you had to move the cursor to the far left or the far right to actually scroll around the imagery. Nevertheless there were clear designs on where the user could click i.e. the selected image would highlight. A key piece to this site that I did not see in other sites was the main key. At the bottom of the pages a small menu bar (concealed behind the logo) would appear revealing a list of the different characters that appear in the film. All of the buttons that are in the website are either clearly labelled or, has used strong imagery that lets the user easily know where they would be going within the site.
The designers have obviously thought about the whole design of the site in order to keep the content of the website relevant. With the use of images significant to the film the user can get a strong feel to what they are about to view. What I liked about this website was that as soon as the web page is open the users are immediately exposed to the main content and, gives the audience a clear view on what the website is about.
I think the designers main aim was to gives the audience a closer view about the characters, doing this has also set a clear outlook on the genre of the film. Each character had been given a page with each page stating information about each character. What I didn’t quite understand was why the designers gave the users two different ways to get to the same page. At the bottom of the pages a main menu appears when the cursor hovers over the big image of the panda, each icon is a link to a certain character. The second option is that when the users move around the page they can click on the certain character, which is linked to the same pages, that the main menu pages be linked too. This gives me the impression that the designer’s aim was to make these pages easily accessed because they provide the viewers the most information about the characters. As for the rest of the site I found the content was organised in a way that I could easily find it. For example the temple (the centre of the site) holds the historic artefacts, somewhere where I’d assume they would be. Overall the organisation of the site was a successful design helping attract more users.
The websites interactive elements are quite simple and I feel that more elements could have been added. The main parts of interactivity would be the small clips from the film, which, once again enhances the characters from the film. With the use of sound, imagery and the way I could move around the site (move cursor to the left the page would move left, move cursor to the right and the page would go right) I was kept interested however, this site is still under construction and only two of the buildings were accessible so I will keep looking at this site for future reference to see if anymore interactive elements are added to the site. as the website is for a younger target audience the designers have included activities for the certain age group, this includes activity sheets and colouring pictures however to use these the user must print them off. This could be a disadvantage especially if the user does not have a printer. As this site is mainly for the younger audience I feel that it would be a beneficial idea to include an interactive game because after researching into different websites I noticed that all websites with the same type of target have a game or some type of interactive element that would keep the user amused.
The main aim of this website is to reflect the identity of the film, not so much the company. However from the first look of the website I knew straight away that the film makers were Pixar. I realised this from the high quality design/digital imagery. So, as for the question does the design reflect the website? My final answer is actually yes it does as I have just explained above.
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