White Whale has produced some updated mockups which incorporate much of our feedback from Round 1. This bouquet includes two departmental home pages. The specific content and features of the pages are not final and will be chosen when we’re actually putting the pages together. Take a look at them here: http://coloradocollege.babywhale.net/bouquet/
Changes to note (since the first round designs):
- Admission has been moved to the right to make the navigation more intuitive (to reflect the order of the discovery process).
- Added “& Aid” to the admission heading
- Instead of “In this Section” the section navigation is labeled by the section name.
- The semi-transparent background behind the block dates was removed.
- Subtle changes to the backgrounds (main navigation and page body)
- “CC” removed from “The CC Curriculum” and “CC Newsroom”
Your comments are welcome here, or by email to me.
You shouldn’t have to scroll down on a dept. homepage for information. Ideally, all the important information, as well as links should be available on the visible page. Having a big picture on the top is not very useful.
Though I do notice that there’s a button you can click to close or “roll up” the big banner picture, making the important information rise to the top. I’d want to play with that live to really see what it’s like, so I’m not sure yet if that would work well or not.
Still really liking everything. Although now that there’s more of a selection, my primary impression overall is of… largeness. Everything just feels really big. The photos, the text, the layout. I have to fullscreen my browser to see everything (I’m on a 14 inch Mac). It feels a little crowded and claustrophobic, and makes me a little nervous and inclined to leave the page quickly.
That being said, I really like the individual department pages. Those are definitely my favorite so far. I like the color schemes within the pages particularly. However, the design is starting to feel rather photo heavy. I might like to see some pages with just one photo, or some graphic art, or a video.
Overall, I think that the new pages look lovely, and much more easy to navigate than the current site. I do agree with Tracy, Chad, and Arielle that some of the visual elements, like the photo bar at the top, overwhelm the textual parts of the page.
I am also a little worried about the font for the top of the page. I have to say, I really like the appearance of the top photo bar. That said, I am concerned that this font, the logos and that buttons that look hand drawn will all look dated a couple of years down the road. Since I like how it looks now, I am reluctant to suggest that you replace it with something more classic. However, since we will have this site for years I wonder if a different font would be easier to live with in the long term.
This begs the question: are site elements like fonts, like the photographs, part of the website over which faculty and students will have day to day control? Do we have as much control over this dimension of the appearance of the site as we have over content?
Thanks for the comments! We should have a more bare bones departmental homepage mockup soon; it won’t have the large image at the top and fewer images on the page itself. The various mockups are meant to give you a peek at the flexibility of the design and how varying amounts of content might appear.
@Laura: We’ll be able to change the fonts in the header and other stylistic elements when they become dated. Faculty and students will certainly have control over photos but some elements, like most fonts, will carry through site-wide. Providing a more consistent experience for our site visitors was one of the recurring themes during the “discovery phase” of the project.
Overall, I like the look of the site. I agree with the “bigness” comment, above, though. I’d really like to see what the ideas are for “Support Services.” On the current website, some of those offices are listed on the opening page, but now it actually looks like they are more buried. I understand that the idea of the new website is to make things more easily searchable, but does this mean that the searcher would have to know that they are looking for “services?” Also will non-academic departments/offices templates come “loaded” with the kinds of pictures that are shown on these examples? These might not be the most appropriate for some support services offices. Also, I’m still unclear how the calendar functions will work. Will we have to post things to the CC events calendar (which is posted for the general public) or will there be an option for an internal/CC-only events calendar?
Thanks.