Poor website breakdown

As quoted on Web Style Guide, 3rd Edition, "Good typography establishes a visual hierarchy for rendering prose on the page by providing visual punctuation and graphic accents that help readers understand relations between prose and pictures, headlines and subordinate blocks of text."

I am quoting this to help me discuss the homepage of the website I have chosen. On the home page of the Marquette Transportation Finance page, there is one small heading that reads, "Welcome to Marquette Transportation Finance." Below this three lengthy paragraphs are seen in the same font as the heading, yet only seen slightly smaller. The text is not allowing the reading to differentiate between the heading and pictures as the heading is not large enough, and there are no photos between the text to describe it. The only photo seen on the page is to the far right, and is of a un-titled truck. The only thing the photo offers is an idea that maybe some sort of transportation is involved in the company; however, in reality the photo offers little as that information is clearly stated in the title of the company. The text offers us nothing as it is long and has no bold titles. No one would really read through it. Rather, they might look up the company on another page to receive the desire information, or they would continue on to see if there is a more efficient and organized page to review.

I am going to take another quote from this reading to further explain why the home page, along with the entire set up of the site, is malfunctioned. The quote reads, "The spatial organization of graphics and text on the web page can engage users with graphic impact, direct their attention, prioritize the information they see, and make their interactions with your web site more enjoyable and efficient."

The reason I am including this quote is because I would like to touch on the spatial organization of the website. This website does not engage its users because the information they is not prioritized. Although there are tabs listed at the top of the page, each tab relays the same set up of large paragraphs of wording. The only page that offers a graphic that may be of use to the user is under the contact page where a map is listed that allows users to find a representative based on a state. I do not see how a user would find this website enjoyable or efficient.

One might argue that a finance website of this sort does not need to necessarily be enjoyable; however, the one thing I do think this website is necessary for is to prove the company is credible. I do not feel this website proves that, and an example of this would be that the latest news posted is from 2007. In the reading it states that, the site needs to organize the "content into taxonomies and hierarchies of information." The latest news articles may be listed in hierarchies of information as the newest article is listed first; however, does this even matter if the newest information is from over three years ago?

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html">

I am including this link because I think it is comical. I went to find another website that could help me evaluate mine, yet found one that lacked usability as it was trying to teach me about a good website.