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From: The Vision
Over the Christmas holidays, and now, in between my preliminary exams, I have been busily working on a fresh look for the website. I have been running it for over a year now, and during this time I have learnt a lot. It was time to put what I had learnt into practise.
However, before getting down-and-dirty with the website's code, I decided to do a bit of reading. Out of the library came books like 'The good website guide' and '100 things you mustn't do with your website' amongst others. However, thanks to my love of IT, I also trawled round some of the most popular sites on the web and worked out the conventions they use to make for a pleasant browsing experience.
Also, there were many useful websites online with hints and tips for how best to structure a website like this one. But the most insightful document was one called 'The Glass Wall'. It tells the story of the BBCi redesign of 2002, one of the flagship innovations on the web, and gave me many ideas for creating a successful design template.
So I'd read all about it. The next stage was to draw it on paper, and then to transfer it to the computer to see what it was like. One of the main criteria was an easy-to-use navigation system, which I did by listing the main sections in blue on the left, and then using the green bar at the top for entries specific to the section. Another change was to scrap the idea of having a static navigation bar at the top. Although this had its advantages, there were many problems with it as well, so in the end, I decided to remove it. This technology is no longer used in any of the major websites on the web.
One of the other things I found with the previous design was that it was too dark, and it was difficult to see where the links were. So I brightened the colour scheme and made the links more obvious by having them underlined. The final change was to write everything in the Arial or Helvetica fonts, as I found that some of the older machines running the website did not have some of the weird and wonderful fonts used in the old website.
So what next? Well, after completing a prototype for the design, I launched it secretly in a private part of the website. This meant I could test the design on various different machines, by accessing the private section, and make changes to it as necessary. This was completed on Monday 12th January 2004, so all I had to do was plug the new design into the software running the existing website - not as easy as I thought, as you'll find out in the 'How the website works' article.