Soil Health Resources: Websites

This week for my Agricultural Communications class we are to review a website that is related to our topic and in my case that would be soil health.

I was searching through the soil health sites and quickly realize that there is really just university websites and the Natural Resources Conservation Services websites. I opened the site from Cornell University up and found myself troubled with the layout and the amount of content on the site. I personally prefer simple sites, that have multiple pages with appropriate links associated with them. This particular site seemed to have an overload of information and I found myself searching for quite a while to find what exactly I was looking for.

                                                   http://soilhealth.cals.cornell.edu/

Below is a screen clipping of the home page of the website. As you can easily see there is a lot going on with this site, there is an overload of pictures and it is very text heavy.

 

One thing I did like about the page, was that there was a simple task bar and a search bar. I also really liked that they had options when searching for information. You could search just the soil health website or the entire Cornell system.

 One way that I feel you could fix the overwhelming issue is by eliminating either the blog section or the online resource section and just make them new tabs on the task bar. This would open up the page and allow for more simplicity.  Also the red lettering brings specific attention to only those areas, which makes it hard to focus on what your really trying to find.  I did really like the use of the pictures and the video, yet I would focus on simplifying the imagery to only a few images, because right now it seems a little overloaded.

While the layout and organization of the website may be a miss, I feel that the information and content are right on point. I really like that the website included videos on soil health testing and other information. I also really like the Soil Health Blog section, while I think it could be condensed into another page or have a different layout, I really like the message that it provides.  Being that this is University website I really found no problems with the information, because most of our information of soil health comes right from the Universities and the people working with them.

I want to show a web page that in my opinion delivers the message a little clearer and more effectively.

                                             http://www.ndsu.edu/soilhealth/

 I understand I may be biased because I'm a bison, but I will point out a few things I like a little better.

The two pages have similar content and information. Both websites have blog posts, and both website shows videos and both websites show research etc. Yet this particular website uses an effective layout so that the information is much easier to access. The user has to focus more on the task bar to find the information and by using this method the information is all easily categorized.  The one thing that this website is missing in comparison to the Cornell site is that advanced search bar. I feel this website could benefit by allowing searches only within the website.

If you looking for soil health information and your a visual learner than the NDSU website is for you. If you click the video tab on the task bar it directs you to all the YouTube videos NDSU has on soil health. These are videos taken from several field days and workshops from around the state. They are incredible useful and resourceful. I sincerely suggest that if you want to learn more about soil health you should watch these videos.

                 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCco9hmhuIafRu1VxAPOrNgA?feature=watch