Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Project 1: Redesigning a Website

Redesigning A Website



I chose this website to redesign. It's a car leasing website, but it is hard to even tell that it is that with so many distracting elements going on. Be glad this could only do a still shot, there were actually blinking and moving buttons that were annoying to look at. It's hard to even look at it with so many fonts, colors and flashing things. There are pictures that do not relate to the website at all and way too many effects. I wanted to mainly simplify things. It was hard to redesign because I had to search all around the website to find out what important information I really actually needed.

I chose Toyota's website as a website that portrayed a well designed website. This website uses minimal elements and allows users to click and guide themselves through the website rather than scan the entire thing by scrolling. As Steve Krug said, users only end up scanning a website rather than read the whole thing. They are also usually trying to find something. It is manageable to find buttons because they are clearly set in a different color block and it still advertises its' products in the background without trying to advertise every product they sell, like in the lingscars.com website. The buttons are clearly visible to be clickable. In my design, I used the tabs method approach like the Toyota website did. I think this puts the website in a more organized fashion. The subpage is very well organized too. I used the drop down window for the specs of the car.

This is my redesign for lingscars.com website. The homepage is the first one and the second one is a sub-page by clicking one of the vehicle brands in the left hand side. I create lists and tabs to point out which is clickable which I find extremely important. I created a hierarchy for the website since there wasn't one to begin with. I then tried to group things in an order in which a user would look for a general idea scanning through a website. In the subpage, I incorporated the drop down window to show the specs. I brought down a lot of noise that was in the original website. I thought it was distracting and very confusing and it didn't make me want to stay on the website.