| Perhaps the nicest thing about browsing Dewey Ballantine's site is recognizing how much thought went into making the site easy to browse. (Ideally, you shouldn't even realize how much thought went into the site - it should just work. However, it's our job to recognize where the thought was put in, or, more often, where there was no thought at all.) A good example of this thought is the practice area pages: load one, read a paragraph (just enough to fill you in - but not too much that you've got to scroll through nineteen screens of text), then get a drop-down bar that lists all other practice areas. Want to read about another? Click on its entry in the drop-down bar. Simple. This drop-down bar shows up in other sections ("Recruiting", for example) - but customized to direct you to the specific sub-sections within that area. This not only streamlines the navigation of a site, it leaves the user with a far more positive experience - increasing the likelihood that they'll do what you want them to do (apply for a job, call to hire you, give you more business... whatever). The "News" area could be better - a chart with excerpts isn't as good as reading the real thing. The search engine displays only page titles - which means that pages ought to have more descriptive titles for the search engine to work well. |