The Satori Group

This week's posting is a website created by a few friends of mine for the theatre company they just started, called the Satori Group. Actually, I'm not sure if they created it themselves, as I just tried to do a 'whois' look up on it, with no luck. Maybe since it's a google page? Or maybe Vista is just being difficult? Anyway -

Intended Audience

• An attendee of the Cincinnati Fringe Festival who saw the Satori Group's work and wants to find out more about or attend their current productions.
• People who have read reviews of Satori Group in the Cincinnati papers and are directed to the website for more information.
• Users browsing around for sites on experimental, ensemble-based theatre companies around the country.

Usefulness of Content

Content includes:

• information about past, current, and upcoming productions;
• brief synopses of the group's formation and member biographies;
• press 'blurbs' and entire reviews about past and current productions;
• how to buy tickets and how to contact the group.

For practical purposes of getting the word out about your theatre company, that's really all the content you need. There isn't any extraneous information, so I'd say the content is entirely useful.

Consistency of Design

• There is a splash page that asks you to click 'here' to enter the website. Besides a long Charles L. Mee quote that most people will miss if they don't scroll down, there is an animated screen that rotates pictures of the company in various productions. This is bad design, however, since the pictures only get going after a few seconds, and most users will already have clicked to get into the website by that point.
• The rest of the site is pretty consistent - it's a simply designed website, so there aren't that many bells and whistles to make it inconsistent. The Satori Group logo, row of menu links along the top of the page, and the title of the page above a horizontal rule are constant on every page you navigate to.
• The fonts and colors are mostly consistent throughout.
• One complaint: all the text in the "Press for Satori" is in italics! I understand that they are quotations, but visually, all italics means nothing sticks out, and everything is just a little bit harder to read.

Ease of Navigation

• Pretty darned easy. The most important, relevant information is on the home page (after you've gotten rid of the splash page, of course): current projects in production and upcoming/ongoing performances. One just needs to scroll down to see (in order) the current production, the upcoming production, and the past production(s). Since this is the information most users will want to know first, it is good it's right up front.
• The rest of the content is accessed by two rows of links at the top of the page. At first glance, the links look a little smashed together, and could have benefited from some more spacing, or simply an alternatively-designed menu bar.
• One troublesome aspect I've noted is that once you click on links, the 'back' link is not always in the same place - it's always at the bottom of the page (usually not visible until you scroll down), but sometimes on the left and other times on the right. Unfortunately, clicking on the Satori Group logo will NOT get you back to the home page - it'll just give you a bigger picture of the logo. So you've got to remember that the "welcome" page is where you started if you want to get back there - which is actually pretty intuitive, when you think about it.
• Apart from that, it's such a simply-designed site, that you can get navigate around the content there is without much difficulty.