I’ve been hard at work, in spurts, over the past 2 months trying to design a “refreshed” look for our homepage. Here are a few screen grabs of ideas in progress:
Another One:
Another one:
The top image is most likely the direction we’ll go, and I’m most pleased with that particular design effort. The sad part is, my best design work usually happens at home, on my free time. I don’t work well with distractions, and working in the University Office of Communications makes for plenty of distraction. It often has the atmosphere of a newsroom, and isn’t very conducive to the focus needed for web development. It’s still a good place to be, though, as my office is in the driver’s seat of the campus identity and marketing efforts.
….Reminds me of Zeldman’s Let There Be Web Divisons rant. In the end however, you’ll never be in THE perfect situation, or the perfect web development environment. The goal for me is to find ways to get things done, get things approved, and get things live.
February 12th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Definitely like the first one best.
My only real nitpick would be the size, spacing and visibility (particularly contrast) of the audience links across the top.
Definitely like what looks to be the navigation for the photos. I’m a big proponent of leaving the user in control of their experience. Self-running Flash thingies that don’t allow users to pause, stop, skip back and forward have low usability.
February 12th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
I’d say #1 as well.
I’m not completely familiar with your site architecture, but I might suggest swapping the placement of the audience and category-based navigation. I find users will often jump from category to category, but only move from audience to audience if they really can’t find what they’re looking for.
February 13th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
From an artistic perspective, I think #1 is definitely the most visually appealing. It has a nice blend of colors, the gradient looks nice, and the semi-transparency looks great! I don’t know all the good practices of web design being that I don’t specialize in that so I cannot comment too much about that. Nice work on all three, but I say push for the first.