My Background: Ka Leo
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| Dummy layout for kaleo.org home page |
I've recently became interested in web development this past summer after working as the design editor for over the past year at Ka Leo O Hawai‘i, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa's student-driven newspaper. This semester I made finally the transition from print to web. Though I have never really had a focus in web development, I thought it wouldn't be too far of a leap to go from print to web. Though it is a slow process, we've drafted a new layout for the website that we hope to have up and running in the next couple weeks.
Challenges
While creating a website in itself is a task, creating a news site has more restrictions. There's a lot of research that you need to put in before you make a site. Before you even draft out a page, it is good to know who you're users are:
- What browsers are they viewing the page with?
- What is their screen resolution?
- What operating system are they using?
- What do they want to out of your site?
What's in a page?
There are many things to take into account when creating the layout for your website. But the most important thing is to server your users. People come to your site for a reason, and it is your job to make it an easy and enjoyable experience.
"Keep it simple, Stupid!"
A well-known saying in the programming community, but it has many more applications than that. You want a site that is easy to navigate with high affordability. If people come to your site and leave within a few minutes because they couldn't find what they were looking for, the only thing your site accomplished was to wasting their time.
The Information Age
Websites are not static documents. They can be updated on an hourly basis to provide the most up-to-date content for their users. This is what makes news sites extremely effective in comparison to their printed counterparts. When people view your web site they want the most recent information.
"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"
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| College Publisher |
Good: College Publisher
College Publisher provides hosting for many college newspapers across the nation. Their home page has a very simple layout with easy a simple tabs for navigating the site. The "What Can You Do Here" towards the middle of the page provide simple icons to grab attention and useful links to help new users discover what services the site provides.
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| jQuery |
jQuery, like College Publisher, also provides a top bar for navigating the site. It uses whitespace effectively to provide a very simple layout to forward you to four project sites. They've decided to stick with an analogous color scheme: yellow, green and blue, which is very easy on the eyes and entertaining.
Bad: Yes English School
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| Yes English School |
I remember seeing this site a few months ago, and I must say they made some improvements. I know they're going for a very artistic layout, but their site overall is not very helpful. Their logo is not very easy to read with the rainbow bullseye behind the text. The cursive font they use for each section is not very easy to read. On top of that their site does not offer much insight to what the lessons are like. They only provide their prices.
Ugly: Evolution and the Nature of Science Institutes
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| Evolution and the Nature of Science Institutes |
At first I thought I was looking at a page from ten years ago, but I see that it was recently updated it 2 days ago. Not to mention the site takes about 24 scrolls to hit the bottom of the page. On average you should hit the bottom of a page in about two to three scrolls at most. No one is ever going to read to the bottom of the page in one sitting.
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