Week 7

During this week the group brought in some more wireframes for our website pages, discussed some possible revisions and also agreed on a template for our main navigation and header section of the website. The group came to an agreement that would we use a green colour scheme for this navigation, similar to that used by the Arundel Castle website (www.arundelcastle.org), which we evaluated in our competitor review, as well as the National Trust (www.nationaltrust.org) .We decided this was an appropriate colour as it reflects the historical/heritage angle of the website, and is more suitable than the red and black colour scheme used on the original Sussex Mills Group website, which is actually similar to that used by the London Dungeon (www.the-dungeons.co.uk). Due to the nature of our website, and the amount and variety of material it will contain, we felt that it would be sufficient to use just horizontal main navigation. We thought that adding a secondary navigation would be superfluous and confusing for a user. This week we also again discussed our labelling of links and the overall tone of the website. As we want the site to appear welcoming, lively and inclusive for the visitor we thought it appropriate to try and use verbs in our links and search boxes, such as ‘go’ and ‘visit’ rather than more passive language. As well as the colour scheme, we have decided to use a template page for the ‘visit a windmill’ page of the website; on this page the user will find visitor information about different Sussex windmills which will be presented in the same format in every instance, with tabs housing information regarding facilities, history and directions. I feel this makes the site easily usable, with the user knowing what to expect when they are seeking information about another windmill during the same browsing session, or when visiting the website on a different occasion. On these pages we will also plan to make use of icons to denote available facilities; this will help give a good visual effect and serve as a quick, clear reference for users seeking this information. A suggestion was made by a group member that a clickable photo stack, in the shape of a windmill sail, could be employed to lead the user to some of the windmills’ visitor information pages. I think this is an interesting concept from an aesthetic point of view, but feel it may be confusing for a user and compromise the sense of hierarchy on the site if only some of the visitor information pages are accessible through this method instead of via the ‘visit a windmill’ link in the main navigation.