-Very easy to navigate
-The contemporary style is simple and welcoming
-The buttons are big
-The site doesn’t have too much going on, so it is fast
-There is clear repetition throughout the site
-The colors are welcoming and the site seems friendly
-The menu bars are in the places that they typically are on other sites, so they are either to find
-The service that the site provides is explained immediately upon landing on the site

Weebly.com

-The service is explained right away
-The Flash demonstration is very useful
-The site subtly has testimonials recommending it on the bottom corner
-The menu bar is very simple, understandable, and direct
-The type face is easy to read and comfortable to look at

What I like:
-Easy to navigate
-Live scores at the top of site
-Extensive fantasy gaming
-When a story is unfolding you can watch “Live” play-by-play
-A lot of strong sports writing
-Big pictures
-Ability to click through different picture to get to different stories
-Brief blogs that keep track of press conferences or media days etc.

What I don’t like:
-ESPN Insider (paid service)
-When you click on a story the video on the page will automatically start without you telling it to
-No real community aspect

https://www.bankofamerica.com/index.jsp

What I like:
-Easy to use
-Useful tabs
-Ability to create alerts
-Allows you to set up automatic payments
-Ability to make immediate transfers

What I don’t like:
-Does not give specific description of what was purchased
-When you go to pay the bill it does not actually show you on that screen how much you owe
-No sound effects

http://games.asobrain.com/

What I like:
-The ability to play against other community memebers
-Increase your ranking
-Competition
-Social aspect inside each game

What I don’t like:
-Slow to load
-A lot of features that are not explained
-Nerdy
-Not very easy to navigate

Apple.com
Likes:
-Extremely easy to navigate
-Very elegant, simple user interface
-Large images, media
Dislikes:
-Nothing, love it all!

LATimes.com
Likes:
-Large main headline
-Lots of content
-Small ads
Dislikes:
-Hard to navigate
-Unprofessional design
-Not enough multimedia content

Pros:

Tons of content on one page
Ease of use
Fast Flip integration at the bottom
Search centered at top and bottom
Header links to many other Google services
Count of similar aggregated stories
Video integration under news stories
Aggregates tons of news sources
Intuitive search

Cons:

Not enough video content – I want every story to offer a video summary
Not all news sources aggregated, e.g. Reuters Video
No comments option under news stories

Torrentz.com

Pros:

Large search engine
Tag cloud of popular searches
Categories, sorted by date
Tracking 8,812,320 live torrents
Rating system

Cons:

No direct downloads
Deceiving “Sponsored Links”
Spam
Not enough control against voting bots, etc
No intuitive search

Last.fm

Pros:

Intuitive search
Very efficient and intelligent sorting
Lots of pictures
Good combo of unique content and social networking features
Smart URL shortening

Cons:

None, I love it!!

Hulu
Pros:
-Free video service online streaming
-Easy to navigate within to search for videos
-Great suggestion feedback box for users w/ questions/comments
Cons:
-Commercials in between videos
-Streams through official website
-Older episodes/shows taken off after a certain time period

Facebook
Pros:
-Great way to keep up with friends, contacts
-Easy to find and search long, lost friends
-Cool functionalities, eg. Birthday Reminders, Create events
Cons:
-Frequent updates and redesigns to the front and back-end
-No control or rights over personal content, eg. photos
-Too many applications that become distracting

Pros:
- Simple design, which makes figuring out the site a quick and very easy task
- Not saturated with advertisements
- The ability to see what other Twitter users are talking about (a.k.a. Trending Topics)

Cons:
- The frequent fail whale
- Difficult to sort or search through your list of followers and the list of people you follow
- Twitter no longer shortens links automatically/lack of integration with third party applications

Facebook

Pros:
- Lots of information presented to you
- Ability to hide posts and updates from certain third party apps
- Flexibility with privacy settings

Cons:
- Way too many third party apps and advertisements
- Can be difficult to navigate
- Frequent errors with chat and search features

YouTube

Pros:
- Easy to find content
- Suggested search
- Ability to share/embed videos on other sites
- Respond to videos with comments or video responses

Cons:
- Copyright issues/companies frequently have videos removed

Pros: Simple layout, straight forward ranking system.

Cons: hard to find old articles. Comments sometimes get hidden. Not visually pleasing.

Mashable

pros: colorful, relatively simple with clean lines.

Cons: too cluttered on the right hand side.

Likes:
-The aesthetic design of the site follows The Economist magazine’s colors and style: red and blue on top, and simple white background for the main body.
-The flash player displayed in the top center of the page features four pictures of four headline stories as a teaser. It still retains the feeling of a magazine, but it is very easy to get information you are interested in.
-One the right side of the flash player is a “Most Commented” and “Most Read” section, which places the interaction between the magazine and its readers into the spotlight and invites more feedback. I absolutely love this feature.
-The headlines and a quick lead of important news in the center section make it very efficient for people to quickly grasp the information they need.
-Scroll down a little bit on the front page, and there is a Video and Audio section, inviting the authors of feature stories to share additional insights into topics, and gives The Economist more multimedia features.
-The navigation on the left is clearly sorted and easy for people to find information.
-It also provides a place for blogs on the bottom left of its front page

Dislikes:
- The ads take up two prominent spots on the site, the top and the center-right. But it is understandable to me as a pay-off for getting free quality content on the website.
-After you read an article, the reader’s comment section of the article leads you to a separate page devoted entirely to comments, it would be nice to see the comments and article on the same page.
-The Economist has opened Twitter and Facebook accounts, but they are too shy to put these two colorful icons on their front page, so it’s not easy for people to know of their social media existence.

Hulu
http://www.hulu.com

Likes:
-The flash player at center imitates the feeling of a TV screen, and it rotates the hit shows as teasers.
-Love how people can easily add tags to shows. These user-submitted tags can get very descriptive of a show (example: people added derisive tags to Jay Leno’s show during his dispute with Conan). The tag function helps you find similar content, and is even more fun than the reviews and rating functions on the site.
-The review and discussion functions have really generated feedback about some popular TV shows on the site. It is nice after you watch a show, you can see right below it what other people think of it.
-The search box on the top-right helps people easily find shows they like.
-Navigation system on the top is easy to use and the channels sorting by genre are also good for people who love a certain type of show to find similar shows.
-Ad-free on the front page.

Dislikes:
-On the front page, shows are listed by three vertical columns of “Popular Episodes”, “Popular Clips” and” Recently Added Episodes”. Sometimes this vertical sorting method can get very confusing. It’s not entirely clear that shows are sorted into columns, so often I click on a show expecting a full episode, but it turns out to be just a clip.
-The site could become more customized for its registered users. I subscribed to a couple of shows on my Hulu account, but every time I enter the site after I’ve logged on, it just displays the universal front page content to me. It would be nice if it could be like Youtube, placing recommended and subscribed shows to me in a column on the front page.

Sina Blog
http://blog.sina.com.cn/
One of the most popular blog-hosting and aggregating sites in China

Likes:
-The editorially-selected and featured topics on the top-center, with links to blog posts that discuss both side of that topic, also links to blog posts related to that topic.
-The feeling that a quick glance at the front page can help me understand what is being talked about in China, and subsequently I can go deeper with rich content via the millions of blog headlines displayed on the front page. (But this feeling is just misleading, see the dislikes)
-Search box is useful to find out specific blogs and blog posts about a key word.

Dislikes:
-Too much content on one page, it is overwhelming and distracting; the result is that, except for a couple featured headlines, none of the one million blog post headlines get the attention they deserve.
-Too much content makes the page looks disorganized. No matter how desperately Sina tries to categorize these posts, for example by the bloggers’ popularity, the topic genres, etc. all that effort is in vain because of the busy and crowded format.
-There is a strange, common census among all popular Chinese portal sites: the more, the better. All of them just pour all their content into one page without considering the side effect that all this content would compete for attention and result in a big blurry, conglomerated chunk of content.

Pros:
Ease to navigate.
Content, in depth coverage of U.S. political news.
Multimedia platforms (video, blogs, online community)

Cons:
Limited access (reader needs to register to read all the other users comments)
No rules for comments (some comments are plainly inappropriate)

Craigslist.org

Pros:
Simple but effective layout.
Easy search functions.
Fast.
Many categories.

Cons:
Scams could be hard to detect for some users.
No format for ads (for this reason, ads can be hard to understand or unclear).

Pollster.com

Pros:
Frequently updated with polls.
Easy to navigate and find information.
Allows comments (online community aspect)

Cons:
Occasional mistake

Likes:
-very clean homepage; easy to navigate
-soooo many ways to “window shop” or browse
when you aren’t exactly sure what you are
looking for
-provide useful/interesting content through
their blog
-”my account” portion is also very easy to
navigate/leave feedback on items purchased
-no ads anywhere! (or at least none that I’ve noticed)

Dislikes:
-my only real complaint is that the search tool will not search items and sellers at the same time

-Newegg

Likes:
-fairly clean homepage/not too jumbled
-promotions are easy to look through (I’m a sucker for a good deal)
-ads are kept to a minimum, and are at the bottom of the page
-reviews:
1.really encourage customers to leave
product reviews and they are usually very
helpful
2.review search options are awesome/many
ways to search and sort

Dislikes:
-despite the fact that the toolbar/drop downs seem very well organized, finding products can sometimes prove to be difficult
-when ordering, they often have combo packages that have free items available for the same price, although its on the page it is very easy to miss that little box and miss out on an even better deal!