The main areas focus of my homepage redesign will be the aggregation of data from other sources and the attempt to eliminate any traces of main navigation.
Firstly, the Elimination of Navigation
Most, if not all websites today have some sort of main navigation; Home, Contact, Products, Categories… Very few websites take full advantage of the interactive nature of modern web design. Websites today display these main navigation items like a table of contents in an encyclopedia, and with good reason; the printed page was the precursor to the web.
However, not only is my website not an online version of a printed medium, but it is also a design oriented web site. I am starting to feel as though my visitors are suffering from a case of convention where it does not belong. My goal is to provide visual feedback using smooth and subtle animations as the mouse cursor navigates the page. I want my visitors to click through my website as if they are making simple, choices about where they want to go next. I will use a lot of cues instead of literal locations. When done reading a blog post my user may be presented with two or more buttons; they might say “Read Next Post”, “Read Another Post”, “Show Me a Project”, “Go Back”. The presentation of the buttons should be vague and the user should not have a clear idea where they will end up after clicking a button,
but the choice should be clear.
Secondly, the Aggregation of Data
One of the characteristics of Web 2.0 is the existence of user generated content. The previous web experience had to do with viewing online content, but Web 2.0 is all about generating your own. Even though I am a webmaster, essentially mandating that I generate content, I have the desire to integrate my other Web-Services into my own website as external sources of content. (Fig. A)
- Twitter.com will allow me to provide a list of status / thought updates on my homepage. This will show my tweets only.
- BooksIamReading.com will provide me with a list of the books I am currently reading and show how long I have been reading them for.
- Delicious.com will provide a list of my recent bookmarks, and can be constrained to a subset of tags.
The aforementioned information will be at the very bottom of the website and just above it will be my blog, or at least a preview of some recent posts. These will be more lengthy writings and may be accompanied with photos, videos, and embedded information. (Fig. B)
Lastly, the Design and Presentation
I understand that some users might like to see my blog and others may not care for it. Because of this I will make the different sections of the website be collapsible. Clicking the hide button will cause the section of the site to roll up like a window-blind. (Fig. C)
The top section of the site will be an area for featured projects and will be manually designed and maintained by me; no aggregated data, no fixed layout, just a container to place a fresh idea into. (Fig. D)
The top section of the site will also have a search box that will fill the contents of the top section with search results as you type. If someone is searching, it can be assumed that they can’t see what they are looking for, so as an aid to those users, I will provide a row of navigation at the base of the list of search results. (Fig. E)
Finally, for those users who become deeply interested in my amazing blog posts, there will be a “Show More” link that will dynamically load a few more blog posts in place of the ones that were previously there. (Fig. F)