The Design of the Good features

I've been given a chance to choose a commercial website that i prefer and I've chosen www.adidas.com as my preferred commercial website. We're suppose to talk about text, navigation, links, graphics, and general designs to show a good web page.

I would like to start by talking about text. To differentiate between a good and a poor web page, text is the most important element in every web page. Therefore, adidas's web site shows a very good matching element between text and background. The background does not interrupt the text. They uses a black background matches with white colour font text. On the other hand, their text is big enough to read, but not too big. Besides, the hierarchy of information is perfectly clear. Columns of text are narrower than in a book to make reading easier on the screen though.





Next i would like to talk about navigation. The navigation buttons and bars are easyto understand and use. By just clicking any button in the web site, it will directly browse the user through anywhere within adidas.com. In other words, navigation is consistent throughout the web site. Besides that, navigation buttons and bars provide the visitor with a clue as to where they are, what page of the site they are currently on. For example, adidas.com have many categories such as perfomance, originals and style. It also has an index for it web site.





A good web site must have good links. Link colours coordinate with page colours. links are shown largely in the web site. Adidas uses pictures to represent their links that are interesting to users.




Next is about graphics. Graphics is also important for a web site. It can draws attention of users with graphics. Users will be amazed with the correct graphics used and will kept reading and looking at the web site. Thus, buttons are not big and dorky.
In fact, graphic has an alt label and every graphic link has a matching text link. As for adidas, graphics are used to link from a web page to another web page. In addition, graphics and backgrounds use browser-safe colours and animated graphics turn off by themselves or it will ask weather the user wants it to be played.



Last but not least, the general design of a good web page. Even though adidas's web site got a lot of graphics, every of its pages download quickly. Hence, good use of graphic elements such as photos, subheads, pull quotes to break up large areas of text.Therefore, every web page in the site looks like it belongs to the same site. For example, there are repetitive elements that carry thoughtout the pages such as link logos.

Key Elements of a Commercial Web site ( The 7 Cs)

As taught by our lecturer, Ms. Soh Yen Lu, there are 7 keys of elements of a market-oriented web pages or can be known as the 7 Cs. The 7 Cs are context, content, community, customisation, communication, connection, and commerce.



I would like to start with 1st C, that is context. The context of the site captures its aesthetics and functional look-and-feel. The functionally oriented site focuses large on the core offering, whether is it a product, service, or information. It also emphasize on utilitarian goals such as ease of navigation. Besides that, the aesthetics nature of a site is largely captured by visual characteristics such as colours, graphics, photographs, font choices, and other visually oriented features. Adidas did a great job on both functional and aesthetics context or as known as hybrid design. A lot of visual being shown to minimize the troublesome of users to search for what they wanted and the products is categorize by different category.




The 2nd C is about content. According to Ms. Soh, content refers to any digital information included on a website that includes the medium of the digital subject matter including text, video, audio and graphics and the message of the digital subject matter, including product, service, and information offerings. To be precise, context focus on the "how" of site design, content focus on "what" is presented. As for adidas, they focused more on multimedia mix that refers simply to the variety of media of text, video, image, and graphics.As for the type, adidas is using reference content that have longer shelf life and is historical in nature and is used as supporting or related factual material.

Next is about community. Community is a set of interwoven relationships built upon shared interests. For example, build closer relationships between consumer and firm, and even between consumer and consumer. This sense of community can encourage customers to return to a website because community can create attractive content and community can make certain activities possible or easier, thus satisfying needs not attainable individually. Forum is the an example of a community that is widely used around the world. Therefore, community design implementation for parent sites should reinforce the brand and offer access through interface design and navigation to key actions to forward business goals.



Customisation is the 4th C that I want to talk about. Customisation is a site' ability to modify itself or to be modified by users. Thus, there are 2 types of customisation that are personalisation and tailoring. Personalisation is customisation initiated and managed by the user and customisation initiated and managed by firm is called tailoring. As we can see from adidas's web site, they allow us to search for stores around the world.They even let us use the login registration.








Besides that, the 5th C is communication. Communication refers to the dialogue between the website and its user. There are 3 forms of communication that is Firm-to-user, user-to-firm, and user-to-user. As for adidas's web site, they uses an interactive dimension of communication. It is easy for two-way communication between the organisation and a user. For example, customer service tel line.






The next C that I want to talk about is connection. Connection is the degree to which a given site is able to link to other sites through a hypertext jump, or hyperlink, from one web page to another. These links embedded in a web page and are most commonly presented to the user as underlined and highlighted words, a picture, or a graphic. Adidas uses homesite background as their dimension of connection. It takes the user to a third-party site, but the homesite is noticeable in the background.


Last but not least, commerce is the last C that falls under one of the 7Cs that explained by Ms. Soh Yen Lu. Commerce is a transactional capacity of a site such as the sale of goods, products, or services on the site tag along with shopping carts, shipping and payment options, checkout, and order-confirmation functionality.
Adidas implements a lot of dimension of commerce in their web site. There are registration, shopping cart, and security. User registration allows a site to store credit card information, shipping address, and preferences.



Shopping cart is where user can place items into their personal virtual shopping cart. Therefore, items can be purchased immediately or stored and purchased when the user returns on another visit to the site.



Besides that, security sites attempt to guarantee security of transactions and related date through encryption and authentication technologies.

These are the Key Elements of a Commercial Web site or it is known as The 7Cs. The 7Cs helped a lot in creating an interesting web site for Adidas.

What would encourage me to make a return visit to the website ?

The main factor that would encourage me to return and visit the web site that its design for the web site is fantastic. Adidas apply all the key elements that should be applied and used it correctly. Animations, graphics, sounds, photos, and text are shown accordingly in the web site and that makes me would like to return to this web site. I personally felt very happy when I first visit the web site. Plus, the arrangement of the products are very well arranged. Besides that, Adidas also have all the features of good web site that would attract not only me, the rest of the world who has visited the web site. I personally is a fan of adidas.

In conclusion, www.adidas.com give the users a very enjoyable feeling towards its website.