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Analyzing a website

Because it is midterm season, I'm stressed, and this post is already late, I've decided to analyze attackofthecute.com and combine my decompressing time with my composing digital media time.

Attack of the Cute is a site made for scrolling mindlessly through pictures of small, cute animals.  It's target audience seems to be moms, 12 year olds, and stressed college kids.  It's part of a conglomerate of time suck websites that combine the endless scroll of Instagram with a more active upvote downvote system.  Other sites in the group include I Waste So Much Time (iwastesomuchtime.com), which seems to be a meme graveyard.

Visually, Attack of the Cute draws focus to advertisements at the top of the page, front and center.  There were two ads when I logged on: one for "Kinderboo," another site in this group that curates products for babies and moms, and an outside advertisement for medical careers in the military.

Once you start scrolling, things become a bit simpler.  In the left column, you see a big cute picture, flanked on the right by similar thumbnail images you may also like.  Cat pictures beget more cat pictures, animals in hats beget more animals in hats pictures.  I won't go on.

The right column alternates between the site's current most popular and more advertising, which is nearly native in size and presentation.

Overall, the designer seems to want to keep it simple stupid.  A white background with black bars keep the focus on the cuteness.  The size of advertisements made them feel somewhat native.  Nothing was aggressive, nothing interrupted the scroll.

Looking at the underlying code, it seems like they used divs for everything.  This was surprising at first, until I remembered that this site is probably upwards of ten years old.  The design hasn't changed much since then.  Now to do something like this site, we would probably use flex boxes.

That being said, I think this is a good example of well-documented code.  Despite the length and density of the HTML, I was a pretty much able to see what was working and how.

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