OUGD504 - Design For Web: Content Workshop

Today we discussed what content should go onto a website, and then drew ideas for the home page of our own website.

A landing page is useless and very dated, as the user has to click on it to get to the home page.

If a login is not needed, don't use it, as the client would rather users use something like Just Eat than pay the extra cost.

We discussed what goes on a home page:

• Indicative of content
• Intro
• Phone number, email etc

We discussed what goes on a contact page:

• Enquiry form
• Social media icons
• Phone number, email address, map etc

Users expect two way interaction now with things like blogs, user posts, comments and forums

We wrote down what we thought would be the content on our own website:

We then drew some ideas of what would go onto our own home page:

I found this really difficult having done no research on hotel websites, and not actually knowing the complete content of what is going to go on my website yet. 

We then had to give feedback on each others drawing, and this is what I got:

• Why would they visit this instead of Expedia for example

I didn't find this useful at all, and feel it doesn't apply to me as every hotel has its own website.

• Follows conventions and will be very functional. Maybe think about it being different to a typical site

I agree that is functional, and I can understand why they have suggested to make it a bit different, but I think for my target audience of families, couples, skiiers etc who are probably in their 30/40s who can afford this type of hotel they will want a functional website that is easy to navigate and make booking a holiday easy.

• The layout looks logical and what I'd expect of a hotel site, looks template designed.

A lot of websites offer 'free websites' now, and have a lot of templates on them, which unfortunately are quite good, and I think this makes it harder to create a website that is logical and functional without making it look like this. However, I don't want a website that looks template designed as clients will be paying me a lot more to design something for them than they would on a website that offers free ones. 

• It's functional but it doesn't have anything that stands out. 
• Very generic hotel website. Is there anyway you can change this?

These two comments are the reason I found this exercise unhelpful, because although I can agree with them, I haven't got all the content for my website, they can't see how it would work from the sketch that I did for the home page and what images there would be, so it's hard to judge and say what to change. If I had known people were going to be critiquing them I would have probably drew arrows to links, images etc to say how they would alter. The sketches were more for me trying to think of the exact content etc I would have.

I also felt that when I was judging other peoples website I also had a lot of criticism because I don't know what else they were planning, how it was going to work and in a lot of cases what the website was for.