Tuesday, February 19, 2008

My Sample Page

Here is a link to my version of how I'd like the mainpage to look (roughly speaking). It's a PowerPoint slide; I used Fireshot (thanks for posting about that, Karen N!) to do a rough capture and then manipulated it in PP. I figure this is a quick and dirty way to approximate how I think our page ought to look.

http://www.ulm.edu/~lowe/samplepptpage.ppt

Of course, it's not carved in stone, but it's how I envision the website looking. In other words: my two cents.

[Karen N.: Here's an image of the same (I hope you don't mind that I didn't ask first) :-/ ]

3 comments:

Karen N. said...

This is nice-- I can envision how it could work, and it is much better than having text which has no meaning to a user all over the place ( like here , here , and here ). What I love about your idea is that it all can fit into one small table and the user never has to scroll to see anything. They see everything laid out before them right away.

However, since ULM's resources aren't aren't as vast as larger university's (because they have more degree programs, not because of quality), it might not be necesary to simplify everything. Also, each one of the single-category links will lead to a new page, and if that's not big enough, even more pages after that. But we can do that if we need to.

Megan Lowe said...

I prefer simple - the more complex, the less intuitive. I don't mind going two pages deep with information. But the more involved the page is, the more stuff we try to cram on the front page, the less navigable the page will be to less sophisticated users. I'm not saying we have to cater to the lowest common denominator, in a manner of speaking, but we certainly have to bear them in mind.

Karen N. said...

I'm not saying we have to cater to the lowest common denominator

It certainly wouldn't be that at all. People need things to be as simple as possible when they are browsing. It's a fact.