Renee Mawhinney: ENGL347 Assignment One

  • www.weather.com
    I am finding this assignment particurly difficult due to my lack of surfing the internet recently. Despite this difficulty I was able to find a few websites that I have frequented thanks to my history folder on my browser. Winter is my favorite time of year. I love the snow, the cold and everything else about it. During the winter months my computer browser is often set at .weather.com. This site offers up-to-the-minute forecasts, conditions and stories. I am constantly checking if there is a chance for any type of inclimiate weather including snow, or the occasional flurry. Regrettably speaking I spend at least 30 minutes of every day checking to see what the forecast may bring. Overall the weather.com site is very easy to read and is aesthetically pleasing. The site uses soft blue, dark blue and white as their standard. The links are easily distinguished and is overall truly user friendly. The navigational structure of the site is very simple. When going from the main page of the site to other portions the main navigational links remain accessible to the user. The site also contains other information that I find very useful. For starters it offers road/travel conditions that I use as the basis for traveling to and from Western Maryland during the winter months and traveling to the beach during the summer months. During various times of the year I find the site reliable for other resources such as allergy reports, vacation reports, hotel searches, driving tips, flu reports, and any other information that they may have at any given point that I may find useful. I continue to visit this site because of its structure and I will continue to do so.
  • www.yahoo.com
    Yahoo is one of my favorite websites of all time. I spend hours upon hours on yahoo. I start of my yahoo experience by signing in. After doing this I check my email. Once I get through the countless spammings that I face every day it's off to see who is online among my yahoo messenger friends. I then usually resume my browsing of the yahoo site. The colors are also aesthetically pleasing. The red captures the viewer and the white is calming and the black text makes navigation a breeze. At the bottom of every yahoo site are the basic navigational links so that the user can browse effortlessly. Yahoo also has a wonderful site for those who have never done a web page before. Using that site has made my life so much easier in so many ways. Yahoo Games was a life saver during my summer job. I played a game that is similar to Scrabble to pass the time and improve my vocabulary. Once becoming a member of Yahoo I was able to customize the colors and links that I wanted to make it a better experience for me. This is one aspect of the site that I really enjoy. This site also wonderful for chatting with any type of group that one could imagine. In addition the site offers shopping, TV listings, horoscopes, calendar, a "yahoo" personal assistant, news, yahoo banking, and the list goes on. This site is so large that there is always something new to explore within the yahoo experience and that is why I enjoy the site and will continue to come back.
  • www.ticketmaster.com
    What fun is the internet without pure entertainment? Not much fun. www.ticketmaster is one of my favorite sites because it tells me bands and other entertainment that is coming to a local venue. The site is relatively easy to use. The first thing I do when I get to the site is type in the UMBC zip code to bring up all of the upcoming shows that are booked through Ticketmaster. From that listing I then narrow the shows down according to venue or type of entertainment. Ticketmaster allows me to see up to see what's going on in the Baltimore/Washington area up to six months ahead of time. I can also buy tickets for events online. The system that they have set up is also very user friendly. It took me about 5 minutes or so to set up an account with my email address, credit card information and the amount of tickets I wanted. I can now print tickets off of the online system with my own printer to avoid shipping or holding charges. The navigational system allows the user to search via location, artist, venue, or date. In doing this it allows the user to search more freely. Although this is one of my favorite pages I don't spend much time here. I check the page for updates every now and then. Once I do check for updates I'm usually on the site for about five minutes. I check to see if there are any events that strike my interest, if there is one I will put tickets on hold or buy them on the spot, if not I leave this site to go to other similar ones. I don't find this site as aesthetically pleasing as others even though it is user friendly. I keep coming back to this particular site because it has the information that I want. If another site had the same information I would visit that one instead.

Copyright � 2004 Renee Mawhinney
 
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