I picked this site as it has good and bad points which should be acknowledged.
Firstly, the site goes with a direct theme, and sticks to it. The large flowery handdrawn illustration proves a strong eye-catching focal point. It's use of colour - pinks, yellows, green all contend for your attention. However, to a large extent, the flowery illustrations prove distracting, and jarr with the main content. Your eye finds that it cannot rest.
It is the hand drawn illustrations that give this site it's character. My favourite bit is the dynamic date display, which is represented in a pencil like typeface. This look is often referenced throughout the site, for instance in the title, headings and link borders.
The pastel colours here are nice, in fact you probably could list at least 6 colours on the page. Whilst this makes for a vibrant site, it also makes it jumbled and too much.
Interestingly, I couldn't ascertain straight away where the staple navigation options were. On scrolling to the bottom of the page, I found a list that resembled what I expected.
Going back up the page, the links are presented in a vertical list but in the middle of the page. This is unsual and like me, could hinder a user's understanding of the site.
The site breaks down it's information in different manners. The most successful I feel is the video options on the Media page. Surrounded with a light blue wavy border, it appears aesthetically pleasing and rests OK on the eye.
Compare this to the right hand article links, which uses a combination of orange or pink crayon borders. This creates quite a childish look and the conflicting colours make for a confusing appearance.
Information on the whole is positioned in varying places and so seems to appear a little disarrayed. A good website succeeds through letting the user access information quickly and in the most stress-free, uncomplicated manner. This site challenges somewhat.
If I were to alter the Tennessee site, it would be to go for a simpler colour palette, along with toning down the strength of the large background image. Furthermore, I would adopt a unified layout with more whitespace so that on clicking through the pages, information in it's location, is easy to distinguish. The best bit of the site however is the hand-drawn pencil typography and this I would make this the defining feature.
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