Over the course of the year, the WINOL website (www.winol.co.uk) has taken on a variety of
faces as we try to modernise and build a more user-friendly site. However, there
is certainly still room for improvement which is why, over the last few weeks,
I have been creating some new designs and feel I’ve finally come up with
something worth publishing. The design attempts to draw on features of both other news websites as well as mobile
applications which are becoming more and more popular ways of finding out the
news.
Starting by introducing a colour scheme and taking elements
from our original site, I created a front page that incorporates all the
various aspects of the site, from news to sport and from radio to features.
The idea is to have a bar at the top that scrolls with you
to make it easy to navigate from one page to the next. It includes a drop down
menu with all the various sections of both news and features on it.
News:
In pictures:
As with many news sites, I have decided it would be good to
include an “In Pictures” section that would combine the news in brief with
pictures from the events. This would mean, though, that our reports are likely
to need camera training and will have to remember to take pictures for each
story, something that I have been encouraging them to do already as
photographing things as you work looks particularly good on our social media
profiles, particularly twitter.
Features:
Radio:
Starting this morning, WINOL has taken over a regular slot
on Sound Radio - the University of Winchester’s student radio station – every Tuesday
from 10am to 2pm. We have decided to record each show and create a pod cast of
the best bits using Sound Cloud. Therefore, it is important that we have a radio
page both with the podcasts and, ideally, a live payer for the site (or,
failing this, a link to www.sound-radio.co.uk)
Sport:
Hazny, this is incredible. Loving the "In Pictures" section. Very original.
ReplyDeleteThanks =) Not that original though, a lot of news sites have an "In Pictures" style page nowadays.
DeleteIt would be lovely to have something like this, but Chris seems set on removing focus from pictures because the quality is so-so most of the time. It's really annoying because your designs are awesome.
ReplyDeleteSurely though that's a reason to give us all still camera training so that we have the ability to take better quality photos rather than an excuse not to continue to innovate the website? Thanks though, I really appreciate the feedback =) Maybe I should come up with a less picture based alternative?
DeleteVery good, but setting up the CMS that could crate this would be very difficult. The answer is to split in to two site - a text heavy site for the news, like a newspaper but also embedding the video reports and link to radio.
ReplyDeleteSecondly we have a women's magazine, which can have more impact visually, if we can source some decent pictures.
Thirdly we have an experimental magazine which Jason is working on, but what is hilding this back is not the design but the lack of content
Very good work though. We can wrap in as many of these ideas as possible.
I think we need a fourth magazine which would be an arts/film/reviews thing. This would need a lot of volunteer contributors, but ther ewould be scope for designing this with more impact. design is not purw aesthetics, but a constrained industrial process, and the constraint we have is unreliable content and the design must be based on this fact.
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