Site review

[harrymossman]

Our agency, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, recently redesigned its home page.

The home page used to look like this secondary page.

This is the revised home page.

I have communicated to the designers that the old design has the strength of being clean and crisp, whereas the new design is hopelessly cluttered. The decision makers are about 10 steps above me, so my input may not carry much weight, although they did ask our opinion.

What do you think?

Harry

 

[audiopro]

The old design was a single column and therefore easy to follow. The new design is two columns and harder to navigate. Both designs are attractive but the original one is the clearest to me.

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[Foamcow]

Both designs would benefit from better typography.
Just a little more line-spacing would help massively.

Personally I prefer the original because there is no logical reason for the second column.

If you have 2 columns then each should have a different type or theme of content. Otherwise, as Keith says, it becomes hard to navigate. The different columns denote a difference in the content that isn't there in this case.

I would also say that I prefer the styling of the left hand navigation on the new design but that perhaps some of the titles in there need work to be more descriptive.

Personally, I would look at remaking the original layout's underlying HTML and CSS to make it less cumbersome and avoid the use of tables for layout. While doing so I would probably also make some minor style and colour tweaks such as line spacing, margins, white space etc.

The new layout also took much longer to load than the original.


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[BillyRayPreachersSon]

Why oh why oh why did the revamp not get rid of using tables for layout? If you're going to revamp something, at least do it properly!

Dan



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[harrymossman]

Thanks for your input.

Actually, the "old" format is only about 6 months old. They did start using css for some features. Can't understand why they didn't also use it instead of tables. As I mentioned, I am a mere peon, many levels below where these decisions are made.

Harry