Our purpose in this site is to inform people about our three different spring break experiences and to provide recommendations for spring breakers who are considering going to Banff, San Antonio, and St. Thomas.
Our layout is designed to meet our purpose by providing a simple, easy to navigate website. We primarily used small photos to focus more on the content and text then on the overall graphics.
Our design and text composition decisions
We made design and text composition decisions based on the colors and graphics that we thought were best to use. We selected a color to represent each individual spring break trip to help the viewer recognize where they are at within the page and maintain consistency of the site. We used a two-column grid throughout our website. Our main body of text was set up in a narrow column design to ensure easy readability. On each of the three trips’ main pages we focused on the city and the activities that we did and can be done there. Then we went more into depth and talked about the places that we went and explored with just a brief paragraph on those.
Our problems and how we solved them
We encountered several problems while designing our site. We had all the pages done and thought that we could take them from Image Ready into GoLive and then paste all the text over the background. We soon found out that you couldn’t do this because of the grids that Image Ready makes when saving the file. So we were back at square one.
We then sought out advice from many people with knowledge about the GoLive program. They both confirmed our inquiries and pointed us into a new direction. After this we learned that we needed to make individual graphics in PhotoShop and piece them together like a puzzle in GoLive. This got very confusing because we ended up having over one hundred ten images to work with.
After getting the pages set up, we ready were ready to link the graphics to the desired pages. When we tried to link our graphics the image link then became distorted. After five hours of laying out the pages and then coming to this problem of linking we were frustrated because we couldn’t remember our names, where we were, and how we got there. So we took the weekend off and solved the problem when we got back on Monday morning. We soon discovered that the cell link border icon needed to be checked off. That pretty much solved all our problems.
Each member contributed in the following ways:
Sean, Michelle, and Becky equally contributed to the overall design and content writing for this website. Individually, we each wrote our own text for the trips that we took and experienced. As a group, we tried designed the overall page layout in the simplest way possible from our previous Internet and web design experience.
Usability testing
We asked people the following questions to test user ability and to inform us how we can make it easier for viewers to navigate throughout the page.
- Contact the web designers for questions and comments.
- Get to Sunshine Village ski area.
- Find related links to San Antonio.
- Find the average snowfall at Lake Louise ski area.
- Find the Havensight mall in relation to Charlotte Amalie.
The people we gave the questions to and watched navigate though the website were able to browse with ease. The only problem that people had was trying to find Havensight Mall, but we think that it was our mistake because of the way we worded the question. Most don’t know that Charlotte Amalie is located in St. Thomas.
Copyright©2001 Sean Rustad Michelle Ruckdaschel Becky Stensland
Questions and comments to:
mjruckda1@bemidjistate.edu
slrustad@hotmail.com
beckyjo38@hotmail.com
Last Modified: March 2, 2001