At the meeting last week, and in the tweets, there were some comments about the design for the new site. To be honest it wasn’t being shown in its best light, so I thought it might useful to post a clearer version. Below is our current thinking on how the homepage should look.
As I said at the time, we’ve put quite a bit of work into deciding what should be on the homepage and where. We’ve looked at those services most used by our customers alongside our objectives around improving channel migration. You’ll also be able to see the top level of our redesigned navigation scheme which we hope will make it easier for those customers.
Our next step will be to build a working prototype and do some initial user testing.
Let us know what you think.
Well done guys, It’s certainly an improvement on the current design.
First impressions was that it’s a typical link-heavy council site, but upon inspecting the content a bit further I noticed the content is actually relevant and good!
But theres the problem – it’s quite overwhelming. So I didn’t bother checking the content until I was looking for more things to critique – in reality I would just use the search and skip over that content.
On a slightly more techy note, is the full screen design representative of the final design?
Because it’s very wide and won’t fit a 1024 wide screen. The design could be flexible to fit, but I don’t see that working very well with the design.
And regardless of the page width, all the good content is quite far down the page (The ‘your neighbourhood’ box is great, why hide it?).
Anyway, just some thoughts. Like I said it’s much better than the current design, but thought I’d provide (hopefully) something worthwhile. Happy to provide more thoughts!!
Overall opinion is that it looks very dated.
There is way too much blue above the fold (everything you see before you start scrolling). I expect a council website to be text-heavy, (due to the amount of info needed to be supplied), but there is a real lack of colour, colour blends and imagination in general.
I’d also agree with Tom re the overwhelming point, because there is so much text, I’d just use the search function – which means it had better be amazing as I’d be relying on that solely to find what I wanted.
I think it’s got some good points, but overall looks scrappy and as I’ve already mentioned, dated already. If this were a starting point for a finished website, it would be great, but if this is the finished design concept, it’s dissapointing as I think it still has some way to go.