By Jennifer Kyrnin

Business Sites
Business sites are often easy to review. They have a specific goal and audience and have to present that information to get sales. Let's see how the three entries looked:

Steerforth Press
This site does a great job of tying in the various pages with a specific color scheme. The introductory page shows the contact information for the company, and a sample of their books. It is well framed within the red side panels. Keeping that same rich red color for the navigation and dividing rule lines. The image is a bit large (almost 32K), but it is so nice, that I would leave it anyway.

Some things to look at:

• Alt text. The alt text is missing or non-informative on some of the images.
  I find it interesting that the alt text for the design firm is very clear.
• Navigation. I like the balance on the subsequent pages, but it was confusing to have the navigation menu move to the right-hand side of the screen.

Capitol Web Developments
This site shows off the use of graphical and table elements to pull together an integrated page. The javascript mouse roll-overs give a good overview of what the site is going to contain. I like how the text on the first page gives a good overview of what to expect if they do design for you.

Some things to look at:

• Alignment. The front page has three paragraphs of text, but they are strewn apparently randomly on the page. It would look cleaner if they all lined up on an invisible line.
• Consistency. If you click on any of the links from the first page you are taken to (apparently) an entirely different company. While these pages have strengths of their own, they do not seem to have anything in common with the front page. Even the company logo is different.
• Fonts. Keep to the same font on the page, especially within paragraphs. The best fonts for the Web are san-serif fonts like geneva, arial, and helvetica.

Des Moines Downtown Partnership
This site has a great 640x480 design. I love how it keeps in mind that many viewers are not looking at the Web on a 21inch monitor with 1024x768 resolution. I also like the theme idea, of a slide show that is pulled through the rest of the site with images of film as the navigation. There is clearly a lot of information on this site, and the front page shows this without being cluttered.

Some things to look at:

• Alt text. There are 7 images on the page which have no alt text.
• Image size. While most of the images are not excesively large, there is one (splashslideshow.gif) which is 68K. The total is almost 102K which could take almost a minute to download.
• Consistency. I love the black background because it reinforces the slideshow theme, but when you click to an inner page, the contrast (from a black background to a white one) is very strong, and somewhat jarring.

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