Introduction:-Dance Responsibly is a website sponsored by HI NRG (a new Vodka and Energy drink) that encourages using their energy drink to “dance responsibly”. The entire website is designed in flash and broadband is needed to have a decent navigation experience

Form

With a variety of bright colours and aesthetic and appropriate graphics, Dance Responsibly has excellent design and is attractive to the intended audience of 18-30yo partygoers. Small detail has been well placed, such as the grey background pattern on black and the black silhouetted crowd at the bottom. Throughout the site, the “Dance Policewomen” (ie sexy looking female cops) feature with the logo and walk around in Flash animation waving their fingers in a “naughty naughty” gesture.

The entrance page contains a location and birthday selection in order to enter the site. This removes the responsibility of being of age onto the reader, but since there is no porn on the site, only information about behaviour, it is a good precaution and suitable for the purpose.

Design on the main part of the website is interesting and well thought out. The HI NRG and the Dance Party logos were excellent and a fine example of logo design. Since there were so many colours used to make this website exciting, having the logo coloured differently to the page design was not a problem. I particularly liked the red music bar down the bottom.

There was a fair bit of multimedia on the site which was also well executed in design, from pop up registration and download windows to a video player and music. All of this added to an entertaining web experience.

The loading graphic of the HI NRG drink is attractive and an ideal loading screen (using a small graphic) although at one point clicking between “Home” and “Videos” the black loading screen covered a bit more window than was needed. This was the only design issue discovered during the visit.

Function

The navigation for “Dance Responsibly” is simple and makes the most of promotion of competitions by having less pages and more links. All links from the home page worked and so did the video player, Flash animations and music. Too bad for dialup users.

The concept of “dancing responsibly” is a noble one and HI NRG have tried hard to sell the idea with an interesting and appealing website. While it is always going to be a bit contentious that an alcoholic beverage manufacturer is telling youngsters to “dance responsibly” it is preferable to do this than do nothing, especially as you can see HI NRG have put a lot more than a token effort in.

Using the concept of not dancing responsibly as being a “violation” of the law (further promoted by the Flash policewomen) is a grey area – while being a good idea it may or may not appeal to drinkers in this age group. However, the sex is selling this idea so it will probably work.

My other concern was the use of the policewomen in the site. As sex objects, the policewomen don’t do much generally for women who might want to visit the site. I am not sure if HI NRG know their intended audience to be males or bisexual females but to cover all bases, a sexy policeman might be needed to even up the gender issue.

Conclusion
“Dance Responsibly” is an interesting and efficiently executed website with outstanding design and good use of media. It was especially good to see fast loading times and less page code with well-thought out navigation and functionality. I expect HI NRG’s audience to be suitable impressed when visiting the website and that an awareness of dancing responsibly is promoted well by this website.