One of favorite brand sites to visit when I am looking for a new pair of shoes is Nike. Their webpage uses various colorful graphics that open the page, while also having a clean navigation bar at the top of the page. Being real familiar with Nike, the site is easy navigate, but I think that most consumers find that their site useful when looking for their products. The navigation is simply broken down by men, women, and kids. When hover over the tabs they give a drop menu for every category of products they have for those tabs. The graphics the site uses are usually from their most recent ad campaigns, along with other products they are endorsing at the time. This particular picture to the left is one I screenshot from my iPhone. It is promoting their new pegasus running shoe. I like the use of color in the graphic, but I think they should have choose a different color for the font in front of the shoe.
The next brand site I visit quite often is Mizuno. Their webpage uses a similar layout to Nikes, with the exception that their navigation is aligned horizontally, and the categories they use are by sport, not gender. They still use large colorful graphics as well to open the page promoting their latest products. The graphics Mizuno uses are more focused not the product than the athletes that endorse them. The picture to the right is another screenshot of the site from my iPhone. The graphic used here promotes their latest Wave Enigma 5 running shoes. I think the picture and placement of the shoes are great, but now really looking at it, I wish they would have used a different background that would highlight a little bit better.
The last site I like to visit when looking for shoes is Vans Off the Wall. The layout also very similar to Nike and Mizuno, but I feel like Vans really utilizes this layout the best because of their use of placement and color. The graphics used to promote their product are not too colorful, but flow very well with the page. I really how they didn’t just use plain text in the graphic and really made it stand out with the background and text box. The navigation for the site is also very similar to Nike’s, just hover over the tabs and you get a drop down menu of the different product categories for that gender.