Steven+Banaszak+CMNS

=**//__Steven Banaszak__//**=

Overall the CMNS website is fairly good. The only real problem I found with the website was the colors. The overall trend for websites and applications is to move more toward muted colors so that the user is not distracted from the overall content. This allows the eye to easily stay concentrated on one area and not look at bright colors. Most of their images are nice and readable with a noticeable color but they do not provide text alternatives. I would have added that as a hover feature if I could figure out how to do it.

While I understand that alot of the colors were UMD colors, I decided to add more greys. This allows the site to focus more on what is in the middle. In order to differentiate more between the 3 sections I made some of the background more grey instead of white. This allows for the sections to be more defined so the eye is able to easily move from section to section. Made the right side bold instead of the left because more people will want to use the navigation instead of seeing the current events. I left all of the gradients there because they are a subtle but effective way to differentiate between sections. I also took away the different colored hot topics because the belong to the same section and are already easily distinguishable.

Overall they did a good job but the colors were too intense. Adding more grays and doing more subtle transitions would be the way to go.

[|Original]

[|Modified]

(I'm not sure why but some things do not render the same when opened on my local machine vs. from terpconnect. The only differences I noticed were the position of the date and the center section not being bold in the modified version).