The Hallmark website for Free E-Cards, Photo Cards, Greeting Cards, and many other categories of cards has a banner on its front page where you are able to choose the type of card that you are looking for. When you scroll over the card categories you are able to see a preview and what you will expect if you clicked on that category. The banner is very colorful and has nice images but if compared to the banner for the Barnes and Noble website, it is not as interesting and fun to look at. The banner for the Barnes and Noble website is a great banner showing Barnes and Noble’s “Picks of the Week.” The images of the items scroll along the banner and fade away as it reaches the end. When you scroll over the items with your cursor, the moving banner stops and information for the item, such as item name and price, pops up. I think the banner was very nicely done. It is creative, looks very professional, and fits in with the rest of the website.

The site for L’Oreal Paris includes many interesting flash applications which help you to choose the right makeup, hairstyle, and even hair color. I clicked on the one for hair coloring. The application was meant to help you find the right, or dream, shade of color for your hair. I personally color my hair and also use the hair dyes from L’Oreal so I thought this one might be useful to me. Going through the ‘Find Your Shade’ application there were many instances where they asked questions about your hair and what type of color you may want. So it seemed like I was doing a survey. Clicking through the whole application and ending up in the end with the shade that they called my ‘dream shade.’ After that was done I was able to click into other applications which actually gave tips on what to do to help improve your hair color or what you can do to make coloring your hair a better experience. Through flash, the site gave useful tips on what to do to prepare your hair so that it would be in a better condition to color it and not be as damaging. Even though this site is meant for trying to introduce their products to consumers but many of the things that they teach you about hair coloring don’t necessarily try to sell you one of their prodcuts. Through the tips that are given from the flash applications you can learn a lot about coloring your hair. The flash was done very well throughout L’Oreal’s website. There were very nice images and everything seemed to go together in a fashionable way. Clicking through the site was a very smooth experience and they always had a screen pop up when you would click on a button. This screen would show at what percentage the page is up to until the whole page is loaded successfully. I specifically like it when websites have that feature because I think its a creative idea and also it allows you to know how much more time you have to wait before your page fully loads. I also liked the drop-down menu feature the website has. Whenever you roll over the tabs on the top of the website a drop-down menu will appear and the rest of the site will have a tinted effect and the colors will appear to have a grey film covering them.