Pizza Hut logo…

I think Pizza Hut has a really good logo.  If you haven’t seen it, it looks like this:

For the longest time, I just sat looking at the logo trying to figure out what I liked about it.  Nothing really jumped out at me, I just knew that I liked it.  When I think about it, though, I think I like it because it’s so stylized.  It looks like someone drew the logo with a fat Sharpie or something.  I think that’s really cool because it gives it a friendlier feel.  It doesn’t seem so uptight and commercialized.  That’s really why I like it so much.

As for effectiveness, I think the stylization works for that, too.  It probably gives other people the sense of friendliness that it gives me.  Also, the logo includes their very distinctive, signature red roof.  This is really effective because if someone can’t remember the actual name of the pizza place but they remember the logo has a red roof, they’ll be able to figure out which pizza place it is they want to go to because of the red roof.  I think it’s a really good marketing tool to put the red roof on their building and on their their logo.

Mod 4 Difficulties…

The first major difficulty I ran into was how to make my navigation bar stationary while the rest of the site scrolled.  I looked up how to do this, but I’m not very good with code, so I didn’t really understand it.  I finally was able to do it, with much help from someone, by creating the page in Dreamweaver and using a frame for the navigation bar.  Now that I’ve done that, the navigation bar is locked and wont scroll.  The rest of the site, however, is still able to scroll.

Now that that’s fixed, though, I’ve run into another problem with the navigation bar.  It’s an image of set size that I created in Photoshop.  The problem is that this size doesn’t match up with the size of the browser window.  This results in the image either “going off” the end of the page so there isn’t a border at the bottom like at the top and left, or “stopping short” so there is too much of a border at the bottom.  I don’t know how to fix this, though.  With a table, you could set the dimensions of the table to certain percents, so it would look right on multiple computers and with multiple browsers.  I don’t think I can do this with an image though, especially if it’s in a frame.  I’ll have to look into this more, though, because I feel like there must be some way to have the image look good on any computer and in any browser.

Successful websites…

There are many things that can define the success of a website, depending on what its purpose is.  For some websites, success means having lots of visitors.  Such sites would include sites that want to sell things, sites that want to spread a message, and sites that want to reach a lot of people.  Other sites are considered successful if they provide pertinent and quality information for its audience.  These sites may or may not get a lot of visitors.  Wikipedia, for instance, provides high quality reference information to millions, while http://www.jstor.com is also very informative but has a significantly small audience.  Another way a site can be measured as successful is if it has a lot of content uploaded to it.  This would make sites like youtube, flikr, facebook, and twitter all really successful.

As you can see, there can be a huge variety of things that make a website successful.  How the success is measured directly depends on the nature of the site.  If I had to boil it down to one thing, I would say that a successful site has a well defined purpose and achieves that purpose to a high degree.