INTENDED AUDIENCE
Potential donors, volunteers, and other benefactors
People seeking information about private children's service organizations in Texas
USEFULNESS OF CONTENT
The site does a good job of presenting information about this organization. The slide show on the homepage shows the racial and gender diversity (originally founded for abused and neglected boys, Boysville has accepted girls since the 1980s) of Boysville's residents and carries uplifting messages about life at Boysville -- the children and teenagers are shown smiling and interacting with each other against the exurban backdrop of the Boysville site in Converse.
While the categories on the top right menu of the homepage are a little muddled -- "about" in particular seems vague -- the information they lead to is valuable. "About" is a catchall categor that includes a brief history, a "message" from its director, information about the Boysville Thrift Store and other facilities, information about the board, and volunteering and newsletter information, which also appear under "Volunteer" and "How to Help" in the menu at the bottom center of the homepage and in "Helping" in the upper right menu. Other categories are duplicated like this throughout the page -- multiple ways to get at event information, etc. "Employment" is under "Helping," and "Info" includes basic ready reference materials -- contact information for the organization, individual contacts, etc. While there seems to be a good amount of redundant information at places, the ubiquity of the "Volunteer" link also underscores the goal of this website: to showcase Boysville and bring in volunteers and donors.
"Services" is a key page, because it provides more detailed information on what it is that Boysville actually does -- beyond the mission statement "to help boys and girls become responsible adults." There is both an overview of the services offered by Boysville and more clinically worded sections describing the intake process and plan of services.
The video on the homepage is emotionally affecting and emphasizes the positive -- there is very little discussion of the kinds of young people Boysville does not take in, beyond the references in the video on the home page to Boysville children being "good kids in bad situations"-- abused kids, kids at risk of being at risk. During the 20th century Boysville's newsletters made it clear that they did not take in delinquents and specified carefully behaviors that made a boy ineligible for Boysville's services (sorry, I happen to have done research on this). This issue is very briefly touched on in the FAQ page, under "Info." Generally, through images and text, the website focuses on the children who are accepted and helped. In this way the structure of the website showcases the best of Boysville, its services and the children who are benefiting from those services, in order to draw in further assistance.
CONSISTENCY OF DESIGN
The design is fairly consistent, though the blue striped background seems to clash a little with the warmer colors used for the text/images. The images of the children are intended to be affecting, and support the website's mission by suggesting "before" and "after" scenarios, with greater visual emphasis on "after" images (life is better after you're helped by Boysville).
EASE OF NAVIGATION
The rollover highlighting/selecting on the items in the lower left-hand menu is clunky -- sometimes two items are highlighted at once and you don't know which item will actually come up. Some aspects of the menus seem redundant, and the navigation at times seems circular, with many items appearing in different places from different pages. Again, I think that this may have been done to support the website's mission of attracting benefactors.
No comments:
Post a Comment