Gleaners Community Food Bank Website Analysis

I choose the website of Gleaners Community Food Bank of Southeastern Michigan to analysis. The site clearly states Gleaners mission - Nourishing Communities by Feeding Hungry People, on the heading with the company’s icon and also in the first “What we do” text chunk. From the information provided, I found that it serves three audience segments: donators, volunteers, and partner agencies.

From my perspective, the donators group is the one the organization mostly to target, because compare to other groups, the organization provides exhaustive introductions about donation and put them on a more easy-to-grasp place. For instance, three out of five homepage text blurbs and the first picture comes out in the homepage are all about donation The website groups related items into different menus and links. However, the link name and the hierarchical order are confusing to me. The main menu arranges information as Home, Take Action, Events/food Drives, End Hunger And Partner Agencies.

For the first sight, people will not understand what the End Hunger section means and will have to search. Besides, I think the End Hunger and Events/food Drives sections should be before the Take Action and Partner Agencies. Because people need to see the organization’s mission and approaches before making a donation or partner decision. Moreover, the website does not do efficient in terms of web navigation. Different audiences have to click back and forward among different links to get all the information they want.

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The website’s menu put donation and volunteer together into the submenu of Take Action; It puts some of the partner agent information strangely into the End Hunger section; Besides, the “Need Food Now” which links to Gleans partner agencies occurs twice at the top-row menu and the right column header within a screen length. This duplicate link is unnecessary since to find the information, you do not even need to roll your mouse. The bottom-row menu provides some site navigation about jobs and contact information but does not list any helpful information on location or site map.

All these designs make the presentation distracting and inefficient. When I look into its content, I find the information is periodically updated, however, not fresh. The last update news is in October. I volunteered with Gleaner on the first Saturday of November and wanted to see our volunteer pictures on the website. It is clearly promised on website, the volunteer section that the pictures will updated per week. However, it seems that the company ate its words. Since the news is not newest, current audiences will feel disappointed and the prospective audiences may lose their interest to keep looking at the site.

Despite the fact that some information is not easy to access for certain audience, the information content itself is helpful. For example, when I go to the Bag Hunger event link, I can find a very attracting event poster, the event date, location, contact information and even a calendar which brings you to previous and upcoming events. The website is written in a consistently professional and friendly tone. It invites interaction with email newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, mobile and visiting tour. Most of its texts maintain pleasing, easy-to-read line length, use the font size and color that are easy to read from the background.

The line spacing is consistent and easy on the readers’ eyes as well. The text is balanced with vivid illustrative graphics and bulleted lists. The graphs in the website are really powerful. They are adorable and creative in design. When surfing the site, I even stored some pictures in my computer. But a problem about them is the size. They are so small that I have some struggles to catch the words in the picture. Thus the small size kills the informational effectiveness of the pictures. Glearners’ Food Bank has its headlines and page title clear, very simple but still to the point.

So it saves the readers’ time and keeps them interested. Its name and logo are on every page and links to the homepage. The internal links provides identification for all pages with both heading and a short text that explains the purpose of each page. For the Donation site, you can see a description that “You can help feed our hungry neighbors today with your donation of funds or food to Gleaners”. For the volunteer, it has “View a list of current volunteer activities”, “View our Volunteer Scrapbook to see some of the thousands of volunteers who assist Gleaners every year” clearly states the purpose.

The heading also contains a search with an advanced searching option. I tried the search by Wayne State University, and hoped to find their volunteer picture in the scrapbook. But the search gave me twenty unrelated Wayne community, Wayne annual report things. It did not work adequately. On a whole, I will trust the website with my information because it presents its information in a professional way and also because it is a member of many reputable charity organizations.

Even though from my perspective, some items are grouped overlapped and they lack strong logic drive, most of the words are really simple and informative. To make the website look better, I suggest the following:

• Make the images larger and easy on the reader’s eyes *
• Delete the duplicate hyperlink “Need Food Now”
• Change the “End Hunger” to a more clear and understandable title
• Arrange the menu into a logic order –put End Hunger and Events/Food Drives sections before Take Action and Partner Agencies
• Make sure the content is current and keep its weekly update promise

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