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The Brief
You are required to design and build a website for a real or notional client. The final website should demonstrate clear application of website design principles, information architecture and usability conventions.
Statement of Intent
I have decided to design a website for a company my partner works for. Ideal School of motoring offers training for car and motorcycle. They currently have a website:
www.idealdriverandridertraining.co.uk
All the content displayed on my client website was taken from this site.
But there are alot of problems with it architectually and is not very user friendly. I chose to help design a new website for them as I thought it would be a good challenge to bring all the information from the current site and display it in a much easier and simpler way.
Research
For this module, our tutor recommended a book to read which would help us think about the architecture of a site and conventions used in many great sites like amazon. 'Dont make me think' by Steve Krugg gave me a good insight into what works best architechtually and I plan to use many of the examples he gave in my client website.
You can visit Kruggs site here:
The Finished Project
View my client website.
Userability Testing
I did some usability testing for the site to determine whether it was easy to use. View it here.
Did my project work out as planned?
I am pleased with the final website, after going through many prototypes I came to the decision to experiment with CSS navigation so based the site around that. Ideally I wanted the navigation background to change to grey when you were on the selected page. After much experimenting with coding and help from Level 3 student David Carr on the New Media Forum I decided to leave that idea and just stick with changing the font to bold when you are at the selected page. I hope in future to go back to this idea and use it in my future designs. Overall I think the site is easy to use and uses many conventios within information architecture. I am especially pleased with the header which changes when on different pages, I chose specific photos which link well to the pages.
Could it be improved?
In future I would like to perhaps use a bit more colour on the background or a background image. As there was so much information to transfer from the old site I wanted to keep the new site as clean as possible.
Sarah Aylward | Copyright ©