Footaction.com is an online shoe store mostly shoes, In search of the cheapest rubber shoes, basketball, running shoes and sport shoes I found that this site is the cheapest. The site has alot of similarities with bargain adverts that you can find in your junk mail. The text from the layout of images and also the colours used the site provides relevant features of a "The Warehouse" adverts.
The Text:
In this Photo the text use have a major "Impact" which is also the typeface used, "People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word." (Nielson, 1997). The use of "Your" in this text sets a certain degree of personal approach and also it encourages the idea that the way to solve problem is by buying this product. There are also the label text which are the price tag below the shoes, each shoe has its own catalogue of prizes set (Under $150, Under $100, and so on...) and each catalogue links to the page of where different shoes of that price is. The curiousity and temptation knowing what shoes are placed on that page influences the viewer to convince and buy the product.
In this banner, the collection of text encourages the consumer to buy the product by saying that buying a shoe on this site will "SAVE $10" followed by "When you spend $50 or more" again the use of pronoun to create a relationship with the audience. “When a letter or word or sentence or paragraph is placed on a page or screen, it is given a particular lettershape, style, size, and overall shape” (Wysocki 2004, p.127). The banner has 3 typeface size one is the header and one is the subheader, this creates an emphasis of the words, Also the banner has a promotional code that you can use when buying a product on their site, thus influences the buyer. The font used Impact giving a strong streamlined impression and a modern feel, "that functioned rationally, like machines" (Wysocki 2004, p.127). Same as the text that is used in the logo:
Reminds me of the New AUT logo which Darryl said was influenced from modern American Universities.
Colour and Other Visual Elements Used:
The main colour of the theme was Black, Cyan and Grey. The colour used gives a cool swag look giving an impression of Cool and Trendy. The colours are neutral so that the images stands out especially the product.
Footaction.com have used box shapes and borders in most of their designs gives the a finished looked and organize.
Another Visual Element they've used is a Search Bar and a Shopping Cart placed on the top right corner of the site. This helps the buyer to navigate easier, it gives a user friendly look and helps the viewer to find the product by typing the keywords of the shoe they want to buy.
Links to Top Brands
Another Banner that is placed just below the site. The website uses “different typefaces and other graphic elements to create a variable surface that can look playful or create a sense of geometric order.” (Wysocki 2003, p.131) The site have numerous links all of these links are placed in a geometrical order. They achieved this by not making the text look like a newsletter. According to Nielsen
"We found that users are extremely fast at both processing their inboxes and reading newsletters: the average time allocated to a newsletter after opening it was only 51 seconds. "Reading" is not even the right word, since participants fully read only 19% of newsletters. The predominant user behavior was scanning. Often, users didn't even scan the entire newsletter: 35% of the time, participants only skimmed a small part of the newsletter or glanced at the content.
People were highly inclined to skip the introductory blah-blah text in newsletters. Although this text was only three lines long on average, our eyetracking recordings revealed that 67% of users had zero fixations within newsletter introductions."
The site achieved this by concentrating the more of the Visual elements on the centre of the site. so the focus aren't all over the place.
The Footaction.com main attraction was its images, images of shoes, different types of shoes...
They were placed everywhere in the site on the centre, bottom and side. This creates a sense of purpose of the site "This can be the central focus of a page or a background pattern" (Wysocki 2003, p.133).
Footaction.com is a straight forward site, It doesn't have any welcoming text, "Kill the welcome mat and cut to the chase." (Nielsen, 2007). They sell shoes, Different types of shoes and they are very cheap soon you'll find yourself clicking on that shopping cart button sooner than you think.
Reference list:
Nielson, J. (2007), Writing for the web: Research on how users read on the web and how authors should write their web pages. Retrieved 05 November, 2009 from: http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/
Wysocki, A. F. (2004). The multiple media of texts: How onscreen and paper texts incorporate words, images and other media. In C. Bazerman and P. Prior, (Eds.) What writing does and how it does it: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices, pp. 123–163, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum.
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