Introduction to Digital Technologies and Multimedia – Disneys Finding Nemo

One of my all time favourite movies is Finding Nemo. This is a Disney movie and the one I chose for this assignment. I found the Official Finding Nemo page by searching on Yahoo. The address where the Finding Nemo page can be found is http://www.disney.co.uk/DisneyMovies/nemo/.

I found the content of this website disappointing due to the lack of information available. The site provides a brief but detailed summary of the plot of Finding Nemo also who made the movie and when. Other information includes images of the characters along with brief character descriptions. The main content of the website is based more on the visual side of things. The target audience of Finding Nemo is mostly young children and teenagers. Therefore the site caters more for this target audience using games, pictures and sounds to attract the viewers.

I was really amazed with the visual content of this site. The home page has an underwater background (blue) with coral lining the bottom of the page. Stoney (1999, p.74) says, “Blue colours should be used as background colours as human beings have trouble focusing on blue.” This website decided to use blue because it is a good background colour and it associates the viewer with the ocean, which is where the film is set.

When you arrive at this site, you are welcomed by the different characters of the movie swimming around your screen. Lines from the movie are also played while the graphics are moving. I found this very appealing because it is important to have a good home page that will influence the viewer to want to stay on that page. The Finding Nemo site did exactly this and I sat there for about 5 minutes just watching the images and sounds on the screen.

The Finding Nemo site has a sequential structure which is both simply and easy to navigate around. At the top of the page there is a horizontal navigational bar. A horizontal menu bar is great in reducing the amount of scrolling a viewer has to do to find information. The only negative aspect of the navigational bar is the text size is relatively small which makes it harder to read and therefore is not time efficient. Text is great in navigation bars because the pages load quicker than images. This is good for me and other users that have slow moderns.

Website structure is an important aspect in website designing. There are two common structures used, depth and breadth. According to Stoney (1999, p. 62) ” breadth is usually better than depth but only if the navigation is well organised.” The Finding Nemo site is more of a breadth structure as the majority of information is found on the homepage, with fewer pages in the hierarchy. This is effective because the viewer does not have to go through numerous links to find the information they want.

The main thing that I really love about this site is that all the links from the navigation bar load straight onto the homepage. When you click onto a link, a scroll appears on the page with whatever you wanted to see. I thought this was great because it was time efficient and there was no going back and forwards between pages.

Stoney (1999, p.72) says ” Limit the use of type faces to a maximum of two, using variations on the single typeface if you want more formality. The text of the Finding Nemo website is all in the same font, Times New Roman. To keep the consistency in the pages the text is sans serif (which is common in websites) using the same font and colour, which is black. The background stays the same but different images and sounds are used for the different information available. This consistency between pages results in clearer and easier navigation.

There is a lot of interactivity on the web site. On the Finding Nemo site you can play various games, download clips from the film and even take pictures of the different characters. This makes the site fun and interesting without over-doing it. However, the only problem I find with this is it takes time to load which can irritate the viewer, therefore interactivity must be available but if there is too much interactivity a viewer can become impatient and leave the site.

I found this site really great. The ocean background was colourful and really drew me to explore the site more. There were lots of sounds but not too many that would become irritating. I found it really easy to explore the site because everything loaded on the same page so I didn’t spend copious amounts of time flicking back and forwards through pages, which I hate to do. The only thing that I would change would be the amount of information available about the film. I think there needed to be more textual information, which I found the site lacked. This is mainly due to the target audience of the site, which are younger children. I believe the site should cater more for a variety of age groups, as the film does. This would result in more people viewing the site. Apart from that I really enjoyed visiting the Finding Nemo Official Website.

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