Summary
The website cio.com primarily deals with providing information on the latest I.T. trends in the realm of business process outsourcing, cloud computing, and the latest news in the tech, software, and security systems industry (Brodkin, 2011). Its primary source of revenue is the various advertisements placed on the site and a few corporate sponsorship agreements as evidenced by the large advertisements of trend micro and Intel.
Overall look and feel
The website possesses a very subdued blue like the color on the sides while the middle utilizes the color white as its primary color for the words written in the articles to be easily read. The menu systems are very clean and simple to look at with the arrangement of topics easily discernable to casual viewers of the site. The site itself is a combination of HTML coding and flash with flash-based applications being used in the menu and advertising sections of the site. The utilization of flash does help to smooth out the remaining features of the site and helps to give it an appearance of simplicity yet possessing advanced features that would benefit users.
Apparent Target Audience
The target audience of this particular website would be people involved in the I.T. industry working for companies such as Convergys, Sykes, Microsoft, and Dell. The items on the submenu already give hints as to the target audience for this particular site and various articles contained within it which focus on better I.T. management, efficient data utilization, and the latest trends in outsourcing.
The usefulness of the site
If I were an individual working in the outsourcing industry and I was looking for a way to improve the I.T. infrastructure of our business I would immediately go to this site for assistance (Johnson, 2011). The articles, video links, and information summaries available on the site are useful for I.T. personnel which would enable them to make smarter decisions in the future in terms of what they perceive to be appropriate levels of I.T. infrastructure improvement (Overby, 2011).
Other Interesting Aspects of the Site
One interesting aspect of the site that I enjoyed was the scrolling news bar feature at the top of the site that gives information on topics that are currently trending. While the use of scrolling text is nothing new in the world of Web 2.0 the fact remains that as of late its use has dwindled with very few sites using this rather interesting feature. The current ongoing trend in presenting trending data has been to use flash-based bulletins usually placed in the center of the webpage.
While the use of flash-based bulletins is also evident on this site they are instead located on the left-hand side of the screen with the center of the website favoring current editor picks for the best topics on the site. Another factor to take note of is the extensive use of social networking promotion buttons on literally every single article on the site itself. While it is obvious that the website administration placed these buttons there to help drive up traffic the buttons do have an interesting flash-based feature where they follow the line of sight of the reader throughout the article. This saves time for most readers in having to scroll back to the top just to click the “share” button on the site.
Relation to the Objectives of the Module
Overall the site itself helped me to understand what works in terms of information presentation. When taking into consideration the objectives of the module, an evaluation of this particular website for me reveals that a simple graphic design combined with sophisticated flash-based programming enables a site to retain its simplistic look while at the same time ensuring users are given more site features to play around with.
References
Brodkin, J. (2011). Windows phone 7 to surpass iphone, blackberry sales by 2015, idc predicts. Web.
Johnson, M. (2011). Making space for creative thinking. Web.
Overby, S. (2011). It outsourcing: study highlights impediments to innovation. Web.