| The home page includes over 100 Kbytes of graphics, which means that it takes about 30 seconds to load over a 28.8 Kbps connection. Once they load, the home page graphics are top notch, and a simple logical site structure is presented. Also, the black background presents nicely on a WebTV browser. The site uses cookies, but we're not sure why. The attorney profiles (under "Meet PGE") are displayed in a three-frame presentation. We feel that its difficult to use more than two frames effectively, and in this case, everything in the bottom frame could just as easily be included in the left frame. The site's graphics are among the best we've seen, but with graphics off, the graphics are too small to display the alt text, making navigation without graphics impossible. The frames implementation really hurts the presentation of the "Articles & Analysis" section (under "News of Note"). Summaries of articles are included in the right frame, a search interface in the left. So our choices are to scroll and browse the top-right frame or search in the left frame (with a search engine we didn't know existed). The search engine is not included in the main navigation bar. And after a couple of searches, it was still unclear what elements of each found file were included in the search engine's output. And if elements such as a search engine are hard to find or difficult to use, people won't use them. Finally, we would eliminate the "Legal Links" section unless the firm can cover a particular area of law in more depth than FindLaw can. And in this case, a simple link to FindLaw would do a better job. |