Valet is a men’s fashion site that provides articles on trends and products. The navigation is two-part. The primary navigation is the horizontal menu at the top of the page, which remains there as you peruse the site. There is also a site map at the bottom of the page. The home page is set up to have different featured articles and headings, such as Ask Valet, Essential Trends, Most Popular On Valet, etc. This format is mimiced in each specialized section found in the top navigation. In essence, the navigation bar at the top acts like a filter. The page remains the same, but the content in each box becomes more specialized. The home-page button (an icon of a house) is always there, but I didn’t notice it at first.
Once in the articles, the site gets a little confusing. The articles can be very very short, and it’s not clearly indicated if there is more to the article. Also, many articles are actually links to Valet’s online Handbook, which is formatted slightly differently than the rest of the site and has it’s own identity/branding/logo. This is unfortunate because it ends up looking like a website within a website. The architecture is not very deep. The amount of linkage makes the site look massive, but a lot of things are just linked in multiple places on one page. The amount of linkage and large fonts with little variety combine to make the site cluttered. Padding and leading would do wonders for this site.
There are some interesting things to note about this site. First, the breadcrumb is in the title of the page, ie at the top of the browser window. I don’t know if this is the most visible spot for a breadcrumb, but it could be just that I don’t usually look there for a breadcrumb, or at all. However, if I got used to it being there, I’d say it’s a good way to save space on the actual page. It works just as effectively.
I mentioned that the pages are short and you aren’t sure if there is more. This is in part due to the way the articles are presented, which is atypical for sites of a similar genre. The pages look like day-to-day rip off calenders. The date is very big on the upper left. There is usually a large image as the focal point. And then there is a short blurb of text underneath, which sometimes links to relevant sections of The Handbook. The articles seem to be about the imagery, but they aren’t. They are trying to provide useful tips or trend alerts. The pictures are pretty, but their size and position make them seem more important than they are. The colors on the page are minimal because the images command the eye.
Another interesting aspect to this site is the fact that they almost never have text within an image. This means that all the text they use is highlightable actual HTML text. In many cases this is overlapping the images, and it looks nice. However, because of the complexity of the formatting, the text is sometimes misaligned, cut-off, or just in the wrong spot. For this reason, I would get rid of this feature. Also, it would allow them to use a font more interesting than Georgia (although it’s working pretty well for them at the moment.)
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