[Cc-webedit] [networking] New Website - Design Concept!

[alistair alexander]

First up, I really like the overall look and feel and I think it’s a great
interpretation of the brief we gave them.

Neil – just seen your comments and I take your point. I think website design
generally tends to be quite clinical. Some websites successfully get away
from that, but they are few and far between and most attempts to be less
clinical are failures (I’ve just had to deal with one of those). Personally,
I’d far prefer to stick with something good and functional, if a little
boxy, than try and come up with something more exciting that could easily
end up being a mess.

I think we make it warmer and more engaging by the imagery and content we
put on it – and one of the good things about this design is we have plenty
of space to do that.

I think this design has plenty of scope to be more dynamic if we want it to
be later on, such as making the main image a lightbox (four mouseover pics),
but I think with 5 promo slots to fill we’ve got plenty to be dealing with
for now.  I think we need to use news content to make the homepage more
dynamic (see my point below).

If Torchbox could style (if we need to) an optional video player for the
main box and the smaller boxes for editors to slot in as and when required,
that would be ideal. I’d prefer not to dedicate one promo slot to video –
rather post video as and when we want to, sometimes we’ll want more than one
video.

Tweaks

Personally, I’d like to see to see the title and main navigation a little
larger and given greater emphasis – currently our mission statement
overpowers it, in my view.

I think Jody’s comments were really helpful, particularly about the camp’s
four main aims – but I think this is less about the design per se and more
about the website structure.

How’s the text for the main image going to work - are the bits in red
hardwired? If so, it could be awkward to edit, if not, the page could
require some configuration when editing.

I also agree with Jody that the content in the bottom half of the page could
be better thought out. I feel having four similar columns is quite hard to
digest as there is no obvious focal point.

 I think we’ve generated a lot of news over the last few months and this
generates a lot of traffic. It also makes the site look far more dynamic and
constantly updated (which it will be of course!). So I’d like to see our
news content – blogs, press releases etc - pushed up the page, certainly
above the fold. I’d also like to see the news content to go across 2 columns
and presented in more of a newswire-style format i.e headline only or
headline and first sentence.

We have tried to keep the number of main sections to a minimum– and I agree
with Jon that it’s good to be disciplined on that. But if we do add an About
Us page, I think this should be integrated in some way into the main
navigation, although not necessarily at the top level.

I agree we need to have space within the site for downloads of posters,
stickers etc and also longer pages on particular issues, for example
explaining carbon trading.

Finally, we need to see how the secondary navigation would look down the
left-hand side.

But, basically, I’m pretty happy with it.


Alistair


2009/8/3 Neil <neil_bye at hotmail.com>

> Hi
>  My immediate thoughts are it's too clinical, no fun. There is far too
> much text to get lost in and too many links to take people away before
> they read it all. The leading picture might work on a leaflet but not
> webpage we need something more dynamic. I don't like the background
> colour.
>
> In peace Neil
>
>
>
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