Design Camp June 11
TODO: this is a work in progress. Still needs to be updated with the final copy TODO: add in example sites
Contents |
Guiding Principles
UI
Is your site navigation driven or search driven? Decide this now.
Navigation
hopes that users will hop from topic to topic, for hyperlocal like college papers, you’re aiming for a lot of your users to read a lot of your content homepage and nav design are critical because you are relying on users to come to the homepage first and use that to get to the rest of your site don’t try to present all your content on the homepage, you want to tease people into digging deeper A strong design emphasis on the nav bar is critical Focus on featured content and give folks lots of ways to drill down into the site Suggest popular stories, list stories that are being commented on the most, suggest the most popular tags (that’s different than a tag cloud, limit to 3-5) Guide your users to what’s important and through that to the less important but interesting.
Search
admits that there is a lot of content on the site and that much of it won’t apply to many of the users. Therefore, it relies on search and Google-as-the-entry-point to drive users to relevant content. Every page is your homepage The actual front page should be timely, with a strong focus on presenting topics. Navigation is used to give the user a visual que what sort of content the site contains or a visual indicator of where they are Use the homepage to present featured content, with many teases to related topics That searchbar better be huge and a prime page element Here’s the goal: a homepage that fits that scheme.
Your homepage isn’t an issue summary
This isn’t a print issue, it’s what’s happening right now. It goes to workflow, but also to webdesign. The web doesn’t work based on what happened last week or yesterday, it’s based on what’s going on now. You want people to come back to the page several times looking for new content. Give the page a dynamic feeling with a constant update schedule.
Do what you do best, link to the rest
You’re goal is a dynamic homepage that covers your niche completely. It’s not real likely that you have the man power to do that, so link to other sources! The homepage is the perfect place to put this stuff. It’s where people are going to go to see, at a glance, what’s going on. Alumni networks (you get a lot of traffic from them), school event listings, local papers, all have good content you can pull from Use Publish2 in your newsroom. Do it. I propose we start a Publish2 Newsroom for College related news. Everything from The Economist ranking the colleges to under-age drinking.
The way the human eye works
This one is a carry over from print design: Art → Hed → Cutline → Deck → Lede Don’t cut out the photos! You need more of ‘em! By the way, video, infographics, other multimedia all count as art No one clicks on the multimedia link This applies more to nav than anything else, but I’ve often seen widgets that have ‘Feature Multimedia.’ This is ludicrous. No one wants to just view multimedia, they want to look at stories, topics, trends, etc. It’s cool to have relevant multimedia listed on topic pages, or even list really cool, timely, multimedia on the homepage as the art for a story, but never on it’s own.
Tag Clouds
Why? Do they work? I’d love to see some analytics, but I strongly suspect no. Tags are a backend system, meant to allow you to categorize data to allow you to create topic pages, or allow content to be searched for. As a front-end element they’re user un-friendly. Stay away from wp-cumulus, it’s a confusing interface for tags that while attractive doesn’t actually accomplish anything – besides, it slows page load times. That said, I do use it on my own blog as a way to show what content I write a lot about. Popular tags are bigger.
Mobile
You. Must. Have. A. Mobile. Version. Of. Your. Site. There’s an easy way to make an iphone friendly version with WordPress – wp-touch. If you can create a mobile version (non-iphone) you should put that link in the upper left corner of your site so that it shows up first for mobile users.
Color Scheme
Pick a scheme at stick with it. This is really more of a site-wide/nav bar thing. But your home page should really reflect it
