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I don’t visit many websites for fun. Pinterest has a fun layout that is nice because it gives you previews of all the cool pins you can visit. I took a screenshot of one of my personal boards. They have a lot of organization, and you can search pins by an attribute like color, room, or theme. You get to most things by using the menu on the top of the screen. Out of all the websites I visit this is most likely the most fun.
I don’t like to use websites that have too much going on. Honestly, I can almost NEVER find what I am looking for on the UAF site. It is super frustrating and avoid it if at all possible. It also feels like UAF is constantly changing the website, so where I found something before gets moved and I go on a hunt for it all again!
On a side note, I must mention that my favorite kind of navigation for a website is probably Craigslist. I don’t need anything fancy, just want to get where I need to go!
Interesting that you say you don’t visit many sites for fun, but the more I thought about it, the more I really don’t spend much time on websites just for fun either. It seems I’m always looking for information or reading news if I’m online. Pinterest introduces a really interesting element of serendipity in its ability to offer content suggestions based on things in which it knows you’re already interested. Not many sites are very good at doing that.
What I really appreciate about Pinterest is that the interface is effective, but it stays out of the way. It is very subtle, letting the visual content grab viewers’ attention. The consistency of how it uses a grid to layout pages and boards contributes greatly to how easy it is to scan large amounts of content.
On your side note about the UAF website, I totally agree. It is nearly impossible to navigate. I usually just search it on Google using Google’s advanced operators. For instance, if I need to find a PDF form or something specific I will search something along the lines of:
site:uaf.edu filetype:PDF registration form
Google’s advanced operators really help speed up search on sites that do search really poorly. This article starts with the easy stuff and gets more advanced with the operators, https://moz.com/blog/mastering-google-search-operators-in-67-steps