Week Three: Critique of existing sites

To gain some inspiration for the layout/feel/colours for our site we looked at existing websites with similar a similar topic and content to ours. 

Taste Real

http://www.tastereal.com/find-local-food/

Notes: This site uses tints of colours well, where a lighter tint of the green is used in the background and a brighter tint of the green is used in the foreground. This gives emphasis to the content in the foreground without the eye being to distracted by the colour in the background. This is a technique in which we would use in our site. In terms of colour, they have gone for a two-colour colour palette, where instead of using a tone of colours they have kept it simple with just using orange and green, with various tints of them. This makes the site very clean and controlled and not to all over the place, which we like. The use of the green as the dominant colour is effective too as straight away you associate things with green like health, organic, vegetables, fruit. 

 Buy Local Now

http://www.buylocalnow.com/

Notes: We like the info graphics used in this site. Where they have incorporated graphs and statistics in a refined way that looks clean and simple and not overly complicated, so the web user can easily get some statistical information without having to look hard at an overcomplicated graph. We have gathered some statistical information too, so we could create some png's similar to these in Adobe Illustrator and place them into the html as img's. This site went for more of a three-colour colour palette, where they incorporated grey as a kind of neutral colour, which is effective when having the infographics. Green and orange were also used in this site, like the previous. 

 Pure Wairarapa

http://purewairarapa.co.nz/

Notes: This site has a real earthy feel with the background colour, and then a berry/vege feel with the use of the foreground colours. These colours are alot more opal, rather than a bright colour which gives more of a like farm, organic feel. Again it's kind of only two colours and the tints of those colours in the colour palette. We feel as though the colours are quite dull for this site compared to the rest.