By Anindita Basu
Wired seniors is supposed to be geared towards users who are over
50 years old. The topics are specifically geared towards them-there
is an email club, bulletin boards, a service to find friends and possibly
love, a home exchange and memorial pages for friends and loved ones
who have passed away. There are also a few search engines that look
through traditional topic areas such as Arts & Humanities, Recreation,
Computers & Internet, Business, Education, Entertainment and Health,
except they look for senior specific content.
While all of this sounds quite nice, I found the site to be quite
disappointing. It's quite tacky in a geocities kind of way-with poor
choice in fonts and graphics that are actually quite distracting.
The colors and glitter detract from the content on the page instead
of complementing or highlighting material.
The layout of the page is also a bit difficult to grasp. There is
a banner across the top, which I personally have been trained to ignore
as a banner ad, but it was actually a navigation bar. Then in going
to different pages, the navigation bar moves to the side and switches
side and design depending on the page. I found this to be disorienting
and confusing-was I getting different information? Many of the links
and information are also quite redundant, although this isn't as negative
because there are different ways to access the same information, so
one can always get to the information.
Some of the services are quite nice. Networking to find seniors in
different states and countries with similar interests through the
email club is wonderful, and the service to find friends and possibly
love is quite sweet. The idea of the memorial page is also quite good-giving
free, permanent space for people to commemorate friends or family
who have passed away. I was a bit disturbed, however, when I tried
to go from the page saying "those who are remembered never die"
to the A to C link and came up with "this page cannot be found."
The same happened with D to F. M to O worked and I felt a little better,
but this technical difficulties in a domain such as this are quite
startling.
In general, I feel that the ideas and much of the content present
in the pages are quite good. The design and layout are just rather
unfortunate.