Games Radar, is a useful website for one who is looking for an insight into the world of gaming. The role of the website is a community, as different people go and review their experience of some digital entertainment. It has a very simplistic layout, but in this case it pulls it off effectively, having nothing on the page wasted. What started as a site for merely posting game related blogs, has flourished and now receive lots of traffic. They are trying to meet the framework of the Online Consumer’s Hierarchy, and optimize the selection for consumers, which websites have been trying to achieve from the start, and are currently attempting it by branching out into not just gaming, but also TV and Films are included now. Even people who don’t enjoy gaming could spend hours on the page looking at posts, as what started as a site for strictly gamers, has now become something that almost everyone could use and enjoy. ‘An ad-hoc development approach to building complex Web systems quickly leads to poorly designed websites that may cause disasters to many organizations (Ahmad et al., 2005). However, in the case of Games Radar, this is not the case. They have not tried to over complicate their website, they have a straight forward layout, with the information you are looking for very accessible. I think one of the reasons they are successful is this layout, not having long paragraphs all over the page, but instead nice images, and a small title, with a key in the top corner of the picture indicating which sector of the website it is related to.

In terms of something to improve on, I think they could potentially provide links or a gateway between all of the things they are talking about in the blog posts, and where they can be reached, so if they had an actual retailer collaborating with the site, which could bring more traffic for all the parties involved. I think the website is very effective at what it does, and has good elements, all which make it easy for the consumer, and meet the Online Consumer’s Hierarchy, as what they are looking for on a blog site, is straight to the point and easy to find the specific area which you are looking for, which Games Radar has accomplished in my mind. However, ‘with few publications and risks that inadequate evaluation practices are becoming standardized (Woolrych et al., 2011)’. There are not analytic websites which can be used to track the progress, however it is hard to quantify how well a website is doing, without asking people their actual opinions which is time consuming.

References:

http://www.gamesradar.com/

Hernandez, A., & Resnick, M. L. (2013, September). Placement of Call to Action Buttons for Higher Website Conversion and Acquisition An Eye Tracking Study. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 1042-1046). SAGE Publications.

Woolrych, A., Hornbaek, K., Froekjaer, E., and Cockton, G. (2011).