TO: Mr. Browning
FROM: Catherine, website design consultant
DATE: November 17, 2014
SUBJECT: Website Critique

At your request, I’m writing with great pleasure to evaluate the effectiveness of the KPMG website. This report identifies the advantages and disadvantages regarding the website from three main points which are visual, typography and page layout.

Visuals
The website does a good job by using pictures to attract customer attention. In addition, it makes good use of white space to enhance readability and emphasize important points. The colors the KPMG website uses are also very effective. It sticks to the color of KPMG logo which is a good branding.
However, there are two main problems with the visuals of the website. First, the website does not make good selection of pictures. When selecting visuals for the website, you need to consider your audience and your purpose. The website uses a picture of a city to represent the services it provide. The pictures does not relate well to the topic and are hard to provide valuable information to the client. To improve, KPMG could use audit, tax or advisory related pictures for the service section or even design specific icons for each services it provides.
Second, the website does not integrating visuals well with text. On the homepage, pictures are over-weighted by occupying almost one out of three of the page. There is a huge section for pictures with small headings underneath. Pictures are useful to attract customer attention and deliver information that words cannot do. However, putting too much weight on pictures could be a distraction for customers to get the information they want. To solve the problem, the website could make the headings noticeable by downsizing the pictures and integrating the related text into the pictures. In this way, the pictures could fulfil the functions of supporting the words.

Typography
It is good for the website to use different font sizes, boldfaces and colors to represent different emphasis of the text. Also, it keeps the typefaces uniform to make the layout clean and neat.
However, the font size of headings in certain sections are too big compared to that of the text beneath resulting in an imbalance. In addition, the fond size of the main text in the news section is too small to read. The ideal font sizes