Wednesday, 24 October 2012

Website Introduction - Lorraine

What purpose does a website serve?
Promotion
Information
Persuasion
Contact
(Entertainment)

Audience for a website is NEVER everyone!


What makes someone want to use a website?
Usability
Aethetics
Functionality

As a general rule of thumb a website for a Graphic Designer should have around 4 or 5 pages.

Pages
If you cant describe the point of a page it shouldn't be there - Landing pages are a no no. Nobody want to click Enter. Why? What is the point?

Contact
Twitter
Email
Phone number
Location - can make people feel more comfortable and also if you are a sole trader this may be mandatory.
Shop - Bigcartel, Etsy?

If you don't want a contact page you can have it as a footer .

CV page
Depends if your working as a freelancer or in full time employment. If your a Freelancer your work should speak for itself. It your looking for employment it might be more important to have a history of employment available.

About
Is it part of the contact? do you need a bio? what do you say? is it relevant information that people will read and give a shit about basically?

Portfolio
I would make this the landing page. Your work is the most important aspect of the website.

Few tips
Clean layouts
Functional navigation
No redundant features
Keep it simple
Use grids when designing

Website mock up workshop feedback
My idea was a centered links bar with a logo below. The middle link bar would be static and the portfolio tiles would be scrollable up or down. The logo would hover slightly transparent maybe over the tiles closest to the links.

There would then be an option to click on the tiles or project and a full screen view of the image would appear.

The links would be simply underlined text. I think buttons are dead.

I don't want a homepage because I have no need for one. My portfolio is my homepage from which you can navigate to About/Contact and CV. There is a portfolio link which take you back to the landing page and 'homepage'.

I had an idea for another page which would be news or a blog. Once you click on this the same layout as the portfolio tiling would appear but instead of tiling it would be a scroll blog left to right. Scrolling down would move the content upwards and out of view. I thought the content could then appear on the right hand column appearing from the bottom. Basically mirrored content on the right hand side. 

I want to design this website properly so I can see what it looks like. The only problem I can see is generating the content to fill the tiles.


  • General feedback was good.
  • Use of logo was generally liked
  • Tiling was appreciated
  • Some people said it looked a bit busy so I think if I was to design this website I would make the tiling images bigger.
  • It was hit and miss about the centered links and also the links. People said they were too small and also they wanted the links to be in a generic place - side and top.
  • People liked the fact I tried something a bit different

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