In this ebow web design blog we’ve got the ebow design team to share their Top 5 considerations for the design of the GAA.ie homepage….we hope any budding web designers 0ut there find it helpful, and of course feel free to comment or ask any questions (ie please do!), you can tweet us too if you like: @ebowdublin with hash tag #webdesign
Being briefed to give an existing design additional features is always a designer’s biggest challenge, picking up where another designer left off, and creating a new, impactful landing page for GAA.ie was no different. First and foremost, you want to give the original design justice, particularly as the inner pages are remaining in their current form, but you want to make the design changes significant enough to have impact on the regular user, and to allow the site to remain functional and easy-to-navigate.
Secondly, you have to consider what the homepage’s priority is, what is being given prime real estate above the fold*. In this instance, that is the site’s focal point; its daily news. To broadcast each top story out to the users visually, a slider was chosen to intermittently showcase each entry ensures the newest, freshest, most visually-appealing content features in prime positioning on the site.
* The fold in web design is the position on a web page where the majority of browsers viewing the page will begin to scroll. Elements that are positioned “below the fold” are not seen when the page first loads.
640 x 480 fold is around 310 pixels down
800 x 600 fold is around 430 pixels down
1024 x 768 fold is around 600 pixels down
1200 x 1024 fold is around 850 pixels down
1600 x 1200 fold is around 1030 pixels down
Thirdly, you have to consider how to display the volume of crucial data involved in news headlines, upcoming fixtures and updated results above the fold line; data no GAA fan is going to want to hunt to find. The optimum solution for this resulted in a tabbed feature, where users could tab and scroll between each, as well as being offered a link to view them all in further detail within the site itself.
Then, you have to consider the longevity of the homepage and that elements will need to be swapped, replaced, added, removed and changed from time to time. The best solution was to create a column/grid layout within the site’s existing restraints, which almost works on a modular level; allowing features to able to be added/removed/swapped/replaced over time.
Lastly, you have to consider what other key areas of interest warrant the prominence of being housed on the homepage; and then prioritise their positioning against their fellow homepage features. The above-fold-features need no introduction; the regular interest demanded of the news, fixtures and results already dictated their prime positioning, then the less regularly-visited, more specialist features begin to appear a little further down the page – simply because the users wanting this content don’t mind delving a little deeper to get it.
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The ebow Crew
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