YouTube is a website that allows people to upload, view, and share videos. You could find your favorite music, video tutorials of any task you're looking for available, a variety of different types of entertainment waiting to be chosen, and so much more all available right at your fingertips. Most of the content on YouTube is uploaded by normal individuals like you and I, yet however some of the larger companies do have their own pages, in which come with a bit of a price tag. Many of today’s young stars and athletes have actually been discovered by others seeking to exploit their talents as they watch these teen’s videos that they have posted on the website. YouTube is not only a video search engine, but a great way to make yourself known and to spread your name out in the World Wide Web in hopes of your talents being found no matter what your age. A website should be evaluated on five specific criterion: appearance, content, functionality, usability, and appeal to audience.
Appearance is essential to a good website because it could be the first and only impression a potential user has. If the appearance is horrid and unattractive then that user will most likely not return, however if it looks appealing and inviting to the eyes, then the user is more likely to return. Appearance can be based off of four different subcategories being good use of color, text that is easily read, meaningful graphics, and simplicity. YouTube’s main color scheme is white, red and black, but since a solid white color can be intense and harsh on the retinas of our eyes, they have dulled it down to a very light gray so that the users experience could be more pleasing. A very important part of the appearance is that the text can be easily read. This implies that the text needs to be a color that is far away from the background which in return, makes it easier to read. It also needs to be in a legible font along with a reasonable size as a website would not want comic sans with 40 size font on every single video, and the website would become a mess and turn off more users. Meaningful graphics is one of the few things YouTube does not do perfectly. A recommended amount of graphics per page is around 3-4, YouTube has a lot more than this but they organize it in such a way that it does not make the page look too crowded. The final portion of appearance is simplicity, a successful website will have a simple design as well as an adequate amount of whitespace. This allows people to focus on the content of the website instead of distracting them with animations or overly complex designs throughout the page. YouTube does this incredibly well, they have their videos down in a straight line with a search bar consistently at the top with any other tools you would need to the left. This yields a simplistic layout and makes YouTube’s overall appearance very nice. Appearance is not everything however, just because a website can look good does not mean the content is good.
Content is important because your site must have substance, it cannot just look good, it must have something that the visitor would need or could use. This is yet another thing YouTube does an excellent job of. Since other individuals are posting their videos, they can’t put their own content on their website, however they can organize the videos to whatever extent they want. One portion of the content is short and organized copy. This means that the topics should be clearly labeled and there should not be very long blocks of text. This is because the majority of users have a very short attention spans and need to be hooked in to the website, a large block of text could quickly make someone leave. Since YouTube is a website that does not use much text they really do not have to worry about this, the majority of their content is in the form of videos and they are highly specific to the person that is looking them up. A user could search for whatever they wanted and they would be shown to a video that would be most related to your search. A user that returns to a website in order to see the news will not want to see the same news as there was three weeks ago, they would want the more recent stories due to the fact that the content remains up to date at all times because YouTube is a user based website and new videos are constantly being uploaded at a very fast rate, quite possibly thousands per day. This would mean that there is always new content for the user to look forward to. The website should also be more user friendly in trying to help you find the video you're looking for if you cannot find it yourself. Each video on YouTube pertains to the people that are looking searching for that specific video or related one. The final subcategory of content is probably YouTube’s weakest section. This would be professional and error-free content. As I mentioned earlier, YouTube’s content is entirely user created and those users do not have to be professionals. This means that the videos could be full of errors which could be anything from inaccurate facts and figures to incorrect grammar. This leads to a large amount of trust on behalf of the user watching the video because they must have faith in the video that everything they are saying is correct. For instance, if someone went to look for a video tutorial on how to do a chemistry problem, they do not know if the person in the video is right or not, the user has to put their trust in the man in the video. When you combine all of these traits with the traits from appearance you get a new section entirely.
Usability is one of the more critical elements of a website, which is often overlooked. Usability is a mix and match between the first two criteria evaluated as well as some new topics that need to be covered. The first of these is fast loading pages, as I mentioned earlier some users have very short attention spans, me being one of them. If my webpage does not load within around 25 seconds I leave the page entirely. YouTube generally has a very fast loading speed, a large portion of this also depends on the speed of internet the user has. Mine is fast so YouTube loads at a nice speed for me, others might not have the same opportunity as I do for high speed internet. This would lead to a decent amount of buffering on the webpage and it would lose some visitors. Overall YouTube’s loading speeds are within that 25 second time range. When it comes down to it, with any major website, the overall performance and dependability comes with some hefty “kinks” in the network most directly due to the popularity of the site.
The next is minimal scroll. When just thinking about those words a person could think that YouTube has a ton of scroll and would not do well in this section. Well I disagree, while YouTube does have a lot of scroll, generally what you search for you will find within the first 4-5 videos. As an avid user of this webpage I generally do not have to scroll down to find the video I am looking for. Logical navigation is another prominent feature of usability. This implies that the menus should be either at the top of on the side of a page and that there should not be too many of them. On YouTube the menus are on the left hand side and there are a limited amount of them, in addition these few menus get you to all of the places you would need to go on the site. In this category YouTube does flawlessly. An important part of any website would be descriptive link texts, however YouTube is an exception to this. I do not think that a user would need descriptors for a link that says sports videos. All of YouTube’s links are incredibly easy for a user of any age to figure out. The final two parts of usability are different browser compatibility and search engine optimization. These just mean that the website should work with most browsers and the search engine on the website should find the most relatable results to what the user is searching for and YouTube does both of these.
The world today, is relied on our technological equipment. As, you could see, YouTube has a vast majority of purposes for it internet page. People all over the world, create and upload
videos to their own page. However, YouTube is for all kinds of people. No matter what sparks your
interest, YouTube has it. Sports, music, comedy, etc., YouTube has a numerous amount of different
types of videos, for different types of people. What makes YouTube stand out is the level of
difficulty is takes to use, this site. People from all ages, could use this site, and find enjoyment doing
so. YouTube is simply a page to find things you enjoy, from childhood memories, to new technical
advancements. It’s a page to explore the world, from the past to the near future, it brings us in line
with the world to learn more by simple videos.
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