The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
The NYO required a new website that appealed to its wide audience group. The website is a place where the NYO can publish all their content including performance schedules, photos, videos and MP3s. The website had to be easily updatable by the NYO staff and a Content Management System was implemented to achieve this.
The Planning
With so many different pages and types of content to be displayed, good planning from the start was crucial to the success of this project.
Creating the website flow with detailed sitemaps helped everyone involved fully understand the complex structure of the site and enabled me to restructure the navigation to be much more user friendly. The website pages where grouped into several main categories and sub-categories, making finding the relevant information for users a lot easier.
Once happy with the website structure it was time to take a look at the the way information should be laid out on the page. Creating wireframes involved laying out the site in basic boxes, shifting the focus onto usability over aesthetics. Creating the blueprint for the design saved a lot of time on this project. There were several user focus groups whose feedback led to a lot of layout changes which done at this stage were easily implemented.
The Design
The design of the website had some very specific requirements. The design had to be simple, clean and most significantly, it had to fit onto a 800 x 600 screen resolution.
There were two initial designs created. One using predominantly dark colours and the other based on white. Both designs were built into working prototypes so that user feedback could be gathered on the use of colour. The information gathered from these tests showed that the design with the white background made the key information clearer and the larger sections of text more readable. Although the dark design was voted aesthetically more pleasing the white was chosen for usability reasons.
The design across all pages was consistent making the site easy-to-use. The information on the pages was uncluttered and easily understood. Use of imagery was kept to a minimum to help users with slow internet speeds access the content efficiently. The navigation was clear and used drop down menus giving quick access to sub pages.
The website had to achieve the balance between accessibility, functionality and aesthetics. The final design accomplished all to these requirements.
The Details
Text only and text resizing functionality was required to meet the strict NYO usability policy.
A site wide search allowed specific information to be found fast.
An interactive calendar was a great way to show when the Orchestra was performing.