Gamespot's & IGN's Functionality/Navigation

The Same: Not Really

Upon visiting both websites, ign.com and gamespot.com seem to display the same navigational scheme. They both have a list of games on the top in both websites and both have tables in the center displaying a main game ad.

A more thorough review beholds that Gamespot’s navigation is in fact more superior than ign. Why? Because Gamespot uses its main categories more pragmatically.

As can seen by first entering ign.com. You see a list of all the system’s on the top:

IGN.com

But with IGN, also displayed on the top navigation bar are other non-related items such as Movies, TV, DVD’s, Stars, Comics, Anime etc. This causes the navigation bar to look cluttered and confusing. Also IGN places several ads over its main page which adds to the mess. Making matters worse, IGN becomes redundant in displaying the categories again on the left, but this time with even more subcategories.

Gamespot on the other hand:

Cleverly displays high level categories on top, such as the name of the systems, and then items such as reviews, cheats etc. (In IGN every category was broken down without reason) It may seem that IGN offer more content and that’s the reason it has more categories on the bottom, but the fact is that both offer the same content. Scrolling to the end of Gamespot, you see another header with categories (see below), these categories have links to other items that were on IGN’s page on top. These items include links to “tech, features, Site Map, Third Party Pages” and more. Also Gamespot displays it’s banner ad on the bottom of the page, making it less distracting and add more organization in helping with navigating.

In all Gamespot as superior navigation outlook and tools than IGN, this may be because Gamespot seems to keep it’s audience much more in mind when planning out their web pages while IGN seems to be attempting to draw more than its original crowd.