Redesigning The WDVL: The Implementation Details
Some of the practical issues we considered were:-
- Should the home page be like a magazine cover or should it
actually provide usefull information - this gets into the accessibility and
number of clicks needed to actually find things.
- Dead space and 'above the fold' placement: reducing scroll to actually
get to the meat of the page, and also effective use the space around the
banner, for example.
- What additional buttons to place, such as for feedback, and where to put them.
- Browser compatiblity issues: Lucy is a stickler for Opera,
but there were other problems we encountered with NS and IE, especially the
way they handle style sheets.
- Maintainability: even though we use
ht to generate things, this is still
an issue that, although probably not consciously involved, is part of any
decision and comes into such things as using text rather than graphics.
- Backwards compatability with things done under old style sheets.
Two inspirations set the foundation for our redesign:
Edward Grossman
created the navigation menu and we all agreed that it was visually appealing and very functional.
Alan complained that our home page lacked 'oomph' and so Linda created a new
design that blew our socks off!
There were various other inspirations that helped drive the process - some we kept,
others we dropped reluctantly,
usually because they clashed with some other design elements or objectives.
An example is a background image that Linda designed
that added visual appeal to our story pages
(see this example),
but eventually we decided it boxed in the content a little too much.
Color:
a couple of issues that need to be kept in mind.
Not all users are able to see all colors.
There are some particular combinations of foreground and background colors
that most people can read quite well, but some people can't.
Some combinations are just unreadable for most.
And some are perfectly readable, but lead to eye-strain after a while
(e.g. black on white).
Judicious use of color helps 'branding',
i.e. establishing site identity.
Gold background for non-content areas such as navigation menus was first popularised by
CNet,
but WDVL was already doing it back then.
We relinquished it's use for large areas for a while,
but kept it as part of the overall color scheme (along with navy and black),
and now return it to prominence.
We've also been using pale yellow as a backdrop for some time.
What's new with this redesign is the introduction of red and black
(from our parent site) and light brown.
Main background. As mentioned above,
we considered a background image but abandoned it.
Alan suggested we change the white background color for off-white,
to reduce eye-strain from the glare.
This one was contentious - off-white looks a little drab.
The user verdict was in favor of the off-white.
Navigation menu: Ed chose the topics and subtopics by considering the site's architecture
(e.g. subdirectories, main areas), the most popular areas
(Top 100),
suggestions, and his own intuitions.
We iterated on this a couple of times,
and it quickly converged to a consensus.
We considered providing dynamic menus
(e.g. with
JavaScript or
Java)
but decided that for now at least,
we didn't want to have to worry about implementing and maintaining extra software
(no, not because of Y2K:).
We will probably go that direction with the next redesign,
for now we needed to focus on the essentials.
Graphics: Linda Cole stunned us all more than once,
with her wonderful images for banners, navigation menu image map, etc.
In the past we've tended to avoid graphics, for various reasons - e.g.
to minimise download times.
We felt that it was now reasonable to improve the site's look with a bit of 'eye candy',
and Linda - a long-time associate of The WDVL - understood our needs perfectly.
She also put up with a lot of change requests :)
The style sheet was created by cleaning out accumulated detritus from the
previous one, and adding in a few new elements needed for the new design.
ht, our pre-processor that takes
'ht' files and adds all the 'boilerplate' stuff such as ad banners,
style sheet link, and navigation elements, was upgraded to the new design.
All of the site's files (some 2,000) were regenerated in a few minutes -
though checking everything, and fixing the (anticipated) glitches,
took a few hours longer. This was, of course, done over the weekend -
first on our development server, then on the public server.
We invited a couple of our authors, and the members of our distribution list,
to comment on the new design (before it went public). In spite of our best efforts
to get honest feedback rather than diplomatic praise, nobody said anything
against it, and all said they liked it. Now I've seen a few ugly and/or unusable
web site designs rolled out in the past, and whoever announces it typically said
"I'm sure you'll all agree, our new design is wonderful!". It's hard to
resist playing the little boy from "The Emperor's New Clothes", but go ahead,
tell us.... :)
If Content is King, The User is God: Redesigning The WDVL
Some of the Steps and Side-branches Along the Way
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