Designs – Concepts and layouts
October 19, 2010 2 Comments
After a lot of thought about how you’re currently using the existing Warwickshire County Council website, analysis of your feedback on how we should be sorting our services, and discussions around how we’re planning to deliver even better services to you online – we’ve got some screenshots to show you.
The following images are all of work-in-progress / beta designs – and it’s important to note that nothing (literally – nothing) has been agreed / decided on yet. The colour scheme is still to be confirmed (it might not be our ‘traditional’ green), two column and three column layouts are both possibilities, and before we come close to switching ‘off’ our old design we’d like you to have an opportunity to play around with a live beta (which is a few months away).
So, when looking at the following screenshots, it’s important to keep a few things in mind:
- we want all of our online websites / applications to have consistent elements (such as a standardised header), so they’re easier to navigate through;
- we’re using high-contrast colours to bring information out and focus your eyes on important sections (such as ‘contact details’, or ‘forms’) that are currently lost in the middle of paragraphs or at the bottom of long pages;
- we think the search engine should be easily accessible from wherever you are (and we’ve got a few ideas about the technology behind how you search too) – which is why we’ve made it more prominent, and;
- you’ve told us that you’d like more information on where we are / how you can reach us – so we’re experimenting with Google Maps (using non Ordinance Survey derived data) to bring you more useful content.
And with that – here are the screenshots, which you can click on for larger (high resolution) versions.
Possible layout #1: 2 column, horizontal navigation
Horizontal Navigation - Service Listing
Horizontal Navigation - Service Page
Possible layout #2: 3 column, vertical navigation
Vertical Navigation - Service Listing
Vertical Navigation - Service Page
So now that you’ve seen a few screenshots – what do you think? Are we going in the right direction? Is information easier for you to find quickly – or have we made it more difficult? Which do you prefer – two columns or three? Should we have horizontal navigation, or vertical?
We’ll publish some homepage designs at a later date, but as most of our traffic actually comes from Google searches, straight to the information pages, we thought we’d concentrate on these to start with. The decisions here will then influence the homepage.
We want your thoughts. Leave comments below or email webmaster@warwickshire.gov.uk
I prefer the two column horizontal layout purely because I strongly believe less is more. It looks less cluttered, something which is important for those who have difficulty with their sight. On this point, I assume that you have received guidance on what colour schemes are most visible for blind and partially sighted people.
Thanks for the comments, Wendy.
We have been using contrast checkers to ensure we hit accessibility targets. The one colour causing some concern at the moment is the grey navigation bar, which is only AA accessible, rather than AAA. But we’re working on this.
We’ll also be engaging with various disability groups around the county to ensure we get all accessibility issues right. We’re also working on a range of colour schemes, such as high contrast, which visitors will be able to select.
In addition, the way we’ll be building it will allow us to tweak designs and styles very quickly, so even if issues are flagged up down the line, we should be able to react and solve these.
We’re preparing a couple of new designs based on all the feedback so far, and will be publishing these soon.