Thoughts on Web Design

Creating a masterpiece

Despite carrying out a card-sorting exercise on my family, there was still conflict over where some elements and pages of the website belonged.  I was uncertain of the best place for some pages of my website, but felt that the overall information architecture hierarchy worked well on the finished site.

Initially, I really enjoyed using WebNode as the templates looked professional and I found it fairly straightforward to add content and edit the pages.  However, the more time I spent working on my website, the more frustrated I became with the lack of control over particular editing elements and the restrictions of the templates.

For the ‘teens@MPL’ page, I wanted to create a distinctive identity for young adults using the library. However, I soon realised that I was restricted to the colours set within the template and although I could change the font colour, I was unable to change the background colours of boxes.  Instead, I resorted to creating a static image in Photoshop which I uploaded to the page to provide an example of the different colours I’d intended to use.  I also used this method to create images to use as icons on my homepage.

Page layout was another very frustrating feature of Webnode. Although there was some element of choice as to the page layout, once I’d filled the blue boxes on my homepage, these then appeared on every other subsequent page I created and could not be edited. This would’ve been bearable if I had enough control to move the boxes around or pin them to the left-hand-side column (which I would’ve preferred) but the combination of these boxes of fixed content and the page layout selection often pinned blue boxes of generic information into the middle of a new page.  Because of this, I often avoided using columns or divisions in layout because of this automatic, unhelpful placement.

I found the search bar automatically appeared in a sensible position where I would have placed it myself.  However, ideally, I wanted to have the option to search the website and also search the library catalogue from that one button (search would be indicated by a selecting a button option, below the text box).  Similarly, in order to access online services, a user of this website would need to register an account and sign in.  I have created pages to illustrate this, but was unable to create the feature.

Overall, I really enjoyed the creativity and design features of this website project and enjoyed trying to tailor the pages I made to my user needs.  I was generally pleased with the colours and overall layout of my website and hope that it appears professional.