Visualizations--Good and Bad

   Images seem to be one of the ubiquitous aspects of the internet.  A major website like SI.com will have hundreds of individual links.  Take a minute and really look at the image below:

   You've got box scores, you've got stories, blogs, front page articles, you have subscriptions, links to every major sport and other topics.  You can go from this page to almost any piece of information in the sports world.  One click.  That's no accident.  

    We are now used to this kind of visual delivery for content.  In the last few years, the internet has spawned the infographic.  A long, visual representation of ideas with text.  You have to scroll through these graphics just as you would a news articles, and they contain text.  What's key here though is how carefully they use color and simple images to get their ideas across.  Here's an interesting example:

Source: Frugal dad

     Some sites are not elegantly organized or barely use any images.  Our school formerly used groupfusion as a webportal.  We had pages that looked like the following:

Groupfusion... Bleh...

     Groupfusion was functional for our school.  You could have announcements and files, links and calendar updates.  But this wasn't much more than a glorified filing cabinet for resources.  There was no real way of prioritizing information by date or importance.  It was hard to group links and files together in a single folder.  But there wasn't the kind of graphical interface that makes other webportals effective.  The kids knew that when they were on Groupfusion, you were doing SCHOOL stuff.  And not in a good way.