Brief 7 - Website Development

As I had all the printed collateral completed, my attention on this brief has turned to the digital side, starting with the website. While I have some initial designs for this, I did comment previously that they needed some refinement and changes made to improve them.

Now the branding has been defined completely and overall appearance of the collateral and convention is very clear to me, I felt able to make the changes to the website to reflect this.

I started by deciding to change the navigation bar placement. Initially I had it along the left hand side, however I do now feel that a bar along the top would be better suited to the content of the website. I also decided that I didn't need the venue and date in the header at all times and that this would only appear on the pages necessary.

With these changes, I started on refining the events page of the website. With the navigation bar now along the top, the content boxes can now full the entire width of the page. I continued with the idea of some boxes being larger than others, adapting these to fit in with the new grid and only expanding width ways instead of height as well. I also decided on changing all the text to white to contrast against the purple imagery, which all boxes would be after the use of block colours didn't work well.

New grid:

I think this design works much better, especially the navigation bar. Following this I moved onto creating the initial page to the website.

Since I created the first poster I had a very clear idea of how this page would be, with the same image spanning the width of the page and all the content around it. With this in mind, I created a simple design which would fit with this. I also included a large button for users to be able to click to purchase tickets immediately.

I also created one the general pages - About - in case I wanted to show this in the presentation boards. While it isn't such a large page, it really helped me in being able to write down the concept and reasoning for the convention in the first place and really come up with a defined concept.

I then mocked the three of these pages up to include the imagery.

Overall I am really pleased with the pages and think they work really well together and individually. I think that they definitely fit in with the printed collateral and reflect the convention well as well as being easy to use and navigate. While there are obviously other pages of the website, at this point, the  creation of these pages aren't important as the reason for the website is put across in these three pages, and it is unlikely that I will use any other page apart from these three in the submission boards for the brief.