FOGE website review

I'm a bit late on this because of my recently hectic work schedule, but I want to go through the FOGE assignment in full here.

First, here are my thoughts after reviewing the FOGE website:

• There is no need for a splash page; it just delays the visitors' obtaining the information they are coming to the site to get.
• The homepage does not give visitors a clear understanding of what FOGE is; if I were visiting this site I likely would have clicked out of it before even trying to use the side navigation because the homepage doesn't offer any useful information.
• Good thing I didn't, because the "About Us" page has a ton of great information about FOGE and why it's important. Awesome! Except that a lot of people may have trouble reading the information because it's written in very small, white text on a black background, which goes against many usability principles.
• I really dislike the underline-overline link hover. I am not sure if that's just me or it's a usability no-no. At least the links are very clearly defined with underlines and a different color.
• The key contacts page is really awful. An e-mail form with a drop-down to select the person you'd like to contact would be a lot better here. And, side note, inline frames are awful too, and really difficult to use.
• The "news" portion is really buried. I would move this information up to the homepage (perhaps in a blog-like format) so it is one of the first things people see when they visit the site. It would also lend credibility to the site (and keep the site owners accountable for updating it regularly!) by showing when the site was last updated.
• I have similar comments for the rest of the site...in general, there's a lot of good information buried under bad navigation and difficult to read text/design.

I don't think this website is appealing to many age groups. Perhaps it is most appealing to kids/teens, but I'm not sure parents/adults would know how to use it. Also, I don't see corporations taking the time to go through this site to find out how they can donate money, which, frankly, is the most important goal for nearly every non-profit.

I would make the following recommendations to improve this site:

• Remove the splash page
• Write a brief introduction about FOGE for the homepage, include one photo of kids (already on homepage), and create a small "news" section that shows the most recent updates/events on the homepage and links to other parts of the website. In thatnews section I'd also embed the "Galaxy Explorers" video since it's new, but I'd also make it the main item in the About FOGE section since it's an introduction to what they do and why they're important.
  
• Simplify the navigation to "About FOGE," "Events and Programs," "Donate," "Volunteer," "Contact," and "For kids only."
• Remove inline frames and use a Dreamweaver template that incorporates columns.

Here's my storyboard. A note: I wanted to show that I would be adding links to the footer, so I "cut off" the design area as if that was the bottom of the page. In reality, it would scroll until the content ended, then show the footer navigation.

Week 8 articles

I found the Designing with Grids article to be so inspirational...I wish I wasn't at work (shhh) so I could sit down and sketch some more layout ideas for my final project! In general, I found I responded to many of the blog designs listed on this page. I kept one in particular, Erskine, for my morgue file because I love the top header graphic. There was a similar element in one of the examples in the Beautiful Web Design book that I also kept in my morgue file.

I'm thinking about how I can alter the layout of the blog section of my online portfolio, while keeping the look and feel relatively consistent with the rest of the site. Blogs definitely require elements (such as another column that lists archive, tags, etc.) that the portfolio pages will not.

I need to go back and review some of our past reading on typography, because I got a little lost while reading the CSS Typography article, mainly in the sections regarding type size and measurements. I'm very familiar with the parts on developing scannable text due to my job as a web writer.

Chapter 6

Man, that was a loooong chapter! Here is the About Tea page. I have a pretty good understanding of CSS; I use external style sheets in all my designs. But this chapter tried my knowledge (and patience) with the subject. I definitely need to go back and take a closer look at some of the sections within this chapter before I try to use Dreamweaver to incorporate CSS into my final project.