OUGD504 - Design For Web: Studio Session 2/Study Task 5

Building on from what we did in the session before, we started this session by thinking about what five pages we would have on our websites, the content for each of these pages and a basic layout.

As my subject is quite a narrow and specific area I found it quite easy to create five separate areas:

• Page 1: Homepage
• Page 2: Anatomy of Type
• Page 3: Hand Drawn vs Digital
• Page 4: Video's of hand drawn type
• Page 5: Origins/History

As a group we discussed the five main pages that any website could have:

• Home page: Indicative of content/intro
• Contacts page: Enquiry form, social media links, contact details
• Gallery/Portfolio
• Forum/posts/user posts

We also discussed what our pet hates were for websites and what made a bad website:

• Contact details not on the home page - having to troll through the whole website to find them - especially annoying when on a phone/tablet
• Images/information categorised and sub-categorised when there isn't enough of it - e.g. a website with only twelve images, all of them split into five sub-categories
• A landing page - a 'click here' page to get onto the homepage instead of a homepage immediately
• A homepage with little information - no clues as to what to do next when on the home page etc

After this we were given the task of drawing out a layout for what we would like our home pages to look like:

I want my website as a whole to be clean and simple, so went for a structured approach with a clear navigation bar, a large title image and a short information paragraph underneath, with contact information at the very bottom.
Once this was done we were split into groups of 5/6 and laid out our layouts for a mini crit. We swapped groups and gave feedback to another group of people while ours were done.
My feedback received:

The majority of it was helpful, although there were a few points which weren't constructive. The main point which was mentioned a few times was the audience my content is being directed at. Although this is hard to show on a layout design, I will definitely consider this when designing and creating the website.