Not signed in (Sign In)

SkillShare - A place to discuss Web Standards and Web Design topics

Categories

Vanilla 1.1.9 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.

  1.  permalink
    Hi everyone,

    I'm thinking on reorganising a site I manage. When I designed it I was keen just to get the new layout up and running and new sections were just added where I thought they fit best at the time. However now the site has been live a while I've had the opportunity to see which bits work and which bits don't so I'm planning a full reorganisation of content while keeping the current design. On top of that my use of CSS has probably developed a little since I put the site live and I'd certainly like to tweak bits of it now I have a little (albeit not that much) more knowledge in the area. Also fix some bugs that I know are there.

    Here's the site: http://paulfans.net/

    I guess what I'm looking for is to pick the brains of some fellow designers and see what you guys would do if it was yours. I'm not looking for "hate it, change the design completely" sort of comments (mainly as people who use the site seem to like the colour scheme and general design) but just what could be done to improve what's already there. What doesn't gell well, what could make it clearer to read and more defined, just some general opinions would be great.

    Any opinions (no matter how harsh - I can take it - I think) would be greatly appreciated and put to good use.

    Thanks.
  2.  permalink
    Well for a start, and this is just a design comment, your menus don't have roll-overs. Naughty, naughty! Even a seasoned web browser such as my self pauses when there's no clear navigation, especially when what you think is navigation doesn't react like you'd expect.

    As for reorganising the site, the company I work for does that every time we jump into a redesign because, at the end of the day, it saves a lot of time and makes the site function better. Plus, more often than not, you can consolidate bites of info to relieve the number of pages users have to navigate through and to.

    As for how to do that, it's rather simple. Just start writing down what basic data you want, bios, photos, videos, contact info, about sections... All of it, make a nice long list of everything you want. Then just start looking for groups. Bios and About info are pretty much the same thing so those can be consolidated into one section. Depending on how much contact info you have that too can be consolidated in there if there's only a little. Photos and videos likewise can go into their own section. You may need sub-sections for some things but you start to get the idea. By the end of it you should have things grouped down pretty well. Now imagine those groups are sections of the site, each having a page. In some cases, like Photos and Videos you may want to put those each on a separate page each. So the section would be Media with sub-pages Photos and Videos.

    Once you've done all of this it should look something like a family tree. This also helps if you use a CMS because you can start seeing what sort of info is going to need to be dynamic and what will be static.
    • CommentAuthorbpb2221
    • CommentTimeJul 15th 2007 edited
     permalink
    The links need rollover effects. a:link hover for the images and text-decoration:underline for text links.

    The link called 'Paul' is very ambiguous and means nothing to a first time user. I had to stop and think, 'Where is this going to take me?' Maybe call it 'About Paul'

    Television, News and Photos should be grouped under Media. Think of the logical hierarchy. Here is the test... If I can say X is a type of Y, then X should be placed in the hierarchy under Y. So, Television is a type of 'Media', and 'Photos' is a type of 'Media'. 'News' is a type of 'Media'. See where I am going? You get the drift. The opposite can be said to, Y have X. Like 'Galleries' have Photos.
    So your hieracry should be:
    Media
    |
    |Gallery (Photos and Gallery could be the same thing, ambiguous)
    >>>
    >>>Photos
    |News
    |Video

    This will free up your Red Nav bar under the picture of Paul so it can read

    About Paul - Media - Forum - Contact

    It would be good to get rid of that nav in the top right corner. You only really need one nav bar.

    I like the design. The colors are attractive.

    Thanks for the question, you gave me a good topic to blog about: Hierarchies.



    Ben Blanchard
    http://webfabric.blogspot.com
  3.  permalink
    Thanks for the comments. I'd actually began doing just want you suggested in regards to the main navigation. For starters I need to come up with a different heading for "media" because although it may be clear what is meant by that to the majority of the people who hit the site for people from the actual media I think it's misleading. One paper in particular was struggling to understand why media wasn't geared for them. :) These are the sort of problems I was refering to in my first post. When I headed that section media I meant it to be audio and video etc, I never imagined that the actual media would think it was for them. Also I couldn't agree more about the "Paul" heading, it's too vague.

    As for the links having roll over effects, I agree, I've slapped my own hands for it. They did actually change colour and underline on rollover originally but I found when changing something else on the site I managed to get that underline appearing under image links too. At a loss for time I just did a quick fix but I really do need to mend that.

    As for reorganisation of content... here's what I've been thinking about doing:

    About Paul
    - bio
    - contact
    - film
    - writing
    - television

    Fans/Interact (something like that)
    - Forum
    - Livejournal
    - Myspace

    Downloads
    - Audio (combining music with this)
    - Video
    - Gallery

    Links

    That would reorganise the content so that it made more sense IMO. I appreciate the comments, hopefully it will all come together now.
    • CommentAuthorbpb2221
    • CommentTimeJul 17th 2007
     permalink
    I like that structure. For Fans / Interact, think of synonym for the words: Connect / Discuss. You can always use http://www.thesaurus.com Think about verbs that describe the actions that are occurring at Forum and MySpace.
    Don't forget the Contact Us page, so user can contact the site admin or whoever the moderator is.

    I wrote that blog post on Navigation and Hierarchies.

    Ben Blanchard
    http://webfabric.blogspot.com/
Add your comments
    Username Password
  • Format comments as (Help)