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I tried to take all of the feedback I received into account when redesigning my website mockup, so thank you. The overall layout remains basically the same but it should now be more visually appealing and utilize the limited space on the initial page more effectively.
- On my draft webpage I was trying to convey too much information on the initial page. People tend to be visually oriented; too much text on the first page will lose their interest. So I instead changed each block of bulleted text to a clickable image that conveys the theme for the sub-category. Now an underlying javascript will manage “hover-over” buttons which go mostly transparent (as shown in the image) to reveal the short description under the button. Then, if the user is interested in that topic, they can click the button to be redirected to a new page with more detailed information. For browsers that can’t display the images the text descriptions are what the user would see instead, (similar to the original layout).
- I also imagined that while waiting for the user to select a category the page would cycle through the choices in the scrolling carousel selecting each sub-category in turn after a 3-5 second delay.
- I had originally chosen fonts for how they looked but my picks were non-standard and propriety. This meant that the fonts I chose might be substituted for a local font by the viewer’s browser and ruin the layout of the page. So instead I used freely available fonts that looked just as good to ensure that users see the site text exactly as I designed it.
- Initially the top of the page had three separate sections which occupied about a third of the whole length. I increased the size of the Alaskan background photo (everything is bigger in Alaska, right) then combined those separate elements into a single section overlaying the new background. This better utilized the prime real estate at the top of the page while also expanding the space below for the images. I also added another Alaskan image of the aurora as a background under the lower section of the page (but it’s mostly obscured).
- I changed the vertical text on the left side of the page to horizontal text above each sub-section to allow the images to span the entire width of the page.
- I changed the color of the drop shadow that I had initially used to better match the color scheme used by other elements on the page.
- The main page now has very little text so, for people who just want to quickly learn what we do I added a “?” icon in the header to lead to the “About Us” page which will have a dense description of the company. Other pages which are mostly text descriptions (partner links, company history, contact info, etc), can also be reach from here.
Here’s the draft version for comparison:
