CoPress

On the schedule this past week for the Summer Web Design Camp was ideas for radically redesigning homepages. Joey Baker led Jake Paul, Lauren Rabaino, Emily Babay, Ethan Klapper, Ben Leis, and myself participated in a discussion of some varying approaches to homepage design. You can watch a recording of the session over on Blip.

Joey started the session by looking at some great examples of different thinking in homepage design. Much of the discussion centered around the approach that Newser takes. While Newser is an aggregator there are still aspects of its design that are important to keep in mind for college news sites as well.

• The importance of images - A user’s eye is going to be drawn to images; while Newser and other sites focus heavily upon photography info-graphics and illustrations can also be extremely helpful to lend some beauty to your homepage.
• Don’t overwhelm the user - Newser sticks to presenting a graphic and headline for each story. Excerpts are only visible by clicking on the story. While excerpts can be used well they ought to be custom-crafted (like Newser’s) and kept brief.

Joey also spent sometime discussing the homepage of the venerable New York Times. The homepage of the New York Times offered the best example of one of the things to be most cautious about when designing a homepage: do not try to make it remain exactly faithful to your print design. While similarities are okay, the conventions of the web must be understood when designing a homepage.

We also spent time discussing the homepage of various ongoing projects. The Daily Pennsylvanian is working on a new site this summer and there was agreement that they way they feature campus events on the homepage is a move in the right direction.

Also discussed was some early screenshots of the redesign that Jake and Ethan are working on for The Eagle. As part of this redesign they are planning on allowing the user to customize some of the content displayed.

On the slate for this Thursday at 5 pm Pacific is a session on designing article pages. Jake Paul will lead us through some of the things to think about in terms of typography, general design, and more. To find out more head over to the wiki or the forum. Interested in participating? You canRRSVP to the event on Facebook. Happy designing!