Final Site Report
The Purpose
We decided last semester to
make our site about the parks in Bemidji. We started with just a few of
the most popular parks, but continued through this semester and added
several more parks. We found as many parks as we could find in Bemidji.
Our purpose stayed the same, in which we wanted to inform locals and tourists
of the many parks there are to visit in this town. We included photographs,
descriptions, and locations.
Layout
The layout of the site makes
the task of finding a park more efficient because the parks (at least
ones that have equipment or historical significance that might draw someone’s
attention to them) are listed alphabetically with separate pages for additional
parks, a links page and additional contact information about the parks
and or related areas of interest.
Changes and
Design
We decided to change our design to a more sophisticated look. We wanted it more formal and professional looking. We took out the splash page as well as the photo galleries. Yes they were nice and made the site fun, but it looked more juvenile.
For the photos, we took some new knowledge we learned this semester and added them as pop-up images within the text of the parks. We took as many pictures of the parks with activities to show what they had to offer.
We decided to get rid of the splash page because it was unnecessary to have it. It was more of a fun thing and wasn’t needed. To make it more professional, we start at the homepage.
We kept the Paul and Babe photo
for our banner on each page. It represents the town of Bemidji.
Because of the numerous parks we included, we had to add another side bar. We could have just kept the left side bar, but it would have been really long, and when things are long in length, people either vaguely skim it, not read the whole list, or plain skip it. So, we split it up into two side bars. We made the right side bar the same blue was the left. We wanted to keep that shade of blue because it was taken from Babe’s photo. It tied it all together.
We also listed the parks in alphabetically in the side bars. We did it this way because it was the most logic. There is no way to say which park is better than another and list them in that kind of order; they are all great parks with their own special belongings. To keep them equal, they were placed in alphabetical order.
We decided to incorporate our new knowledge from this semester in adding embedded links. These links include maps to help locate some parks. Others are links outside to relative websites. We did this to help enhance our site. With links to more information, our viewers can gather more knowledge or may learn something new that is not included in our site.
One other part we took out was the buttons links. In our previous Bemidji Parks site, our links to the four parks and links page were photos of the actual park signs. We, instead, had word links of the parks to their individual pages. As designers, we did this because it was not as formal with the photos for buttons. By getting rid of those, our pages looked neater.
Some of the first things that
we knew that we had to change was:
- We lacked breadcrumbs
- The galleries took up a
lot of memory and didn’t really help make the site more informative
- Pop-ups of images could
make text more interesting and informative
- We needed links to our home
sites
- We needed to lose the cute, unsophisticated, traits of our earlier site
Problems
One difficulty we had was finding
all the parks. We wanted to go personally to these parks to get a personal
view and real photos. It took extra time to find all the parks. Since
there are no addresses listed in phonebooks, we drove around to find them.
By actually being at each park gives a humane, real feel to our site.
Another problem we had was that a bunch of the parks we found were only green areas or under development. We did not want a whole page of those parks that had that for a description and photos of only green grass. To solve this problem, we made a page called ‘Additional Parks.’ This page included a list of these park names and under each name, stated what was there or what was to come if it was in development.
Some of the problems that we
faced while creating the site involved:
- Picking what parks were
important enough to get their own page
- Finding the parks and recording
usable addresses for them
- Getting good pictures that
would show what the parks offered
- Trying to write the text
so that it wasn’t wordy and gave all the important information
that we hoped to be ableto offer for each site
- Dividing the workload and
making time for working on the site
- Choosing what pictures would
stay
- Where the link to “contact information” would be
Working in a Group
Like we did last semester,
we split the parks up equally and each gathered the information and photos
needed for our designated parks. We brought our information together and
each put in our own information.
Together, we worked on how to improve the site and its design. As a group, we worked well together. If one had an idea of how to improve it, add to it, or remove parts, there was no disagreement. An explanation was given for a change, talked out, and worked together.
Each of us was responsible
for our own share of work on this site, this included dividing the parks
equally and each being responsible for the text on those pages and the
images that would be available for pop-ups there. We were each responsible
for getting our own pictures developed.
Some of the work that was done
alone included:
- Jaime was responsible for
cropping and enhancing the images on Photoshop
- Leah did editing on the
site (checking for inappropriate spacing, fonts, font sizes)
We worked together to determine:
- What pictures would work
and where on the site
- What links would be available
- The site’s colors
- The design and content layout
- What text would appear on
the sites
- The initial changes on the
original site
- This site report
Usability
Testing
In usability testing some of
the comments and questions that we got were:
Q: Where did the galleries go?
A: We make the site smaller because we felt that additional pages could
make things confusing for people and it wasn’t really necessary for
the site anyway. But we wanted to keep the images and made some of them
available as pop-ups.
Q: Is the main page the only page that offers the link to the contact
information page?
A: Yes it is, because we believed that if we put it on each parks page
that it would look like a link to specific contact information for that
park.
Q: Why did certain parks go in the “Additional Parks” page?
A: Most of these parks were undeveloped and we thought that people might
not be interested in finding these parks unless they happened to live
in the neighborhood.
Q: What if I’m looking for a place that has boat landings; is there
anyway that you could
make it easier than looking at all the pages?
A: Unfortunately, as the site is set up, right now, one would have to
look through all the pages. However, it wouldn’t take long to search
all the pages if one really wanted to find that kind of a park. They were
designed to load quickly.
From our observations, users found the site to be easily navigable. A
lot of the people were surprised to find that there were so many parks
within Bemidji. There were some concerns about the “Contact Information”
link being so far down on the main page; some people may have a hard time
finding it.
But for the most part, people had no trouble getting around the site, especially because it isn’t as dependent on images to get someone from page to page. In fact, if images aren’t available on their browsers, they can still navigate the site.
Similar Sites
http://www.bemidji.org/recreation.htm
http://www.westlakes.worldweb.com/Bemidji/
http://visitbemidji.com/location/
http://www.mybemidji.com/
http://www.citysearch.com/
BSU > ENGL 3160 > INDEX > BEMIDJI PARKS > FINAL SITE REPORT > LEAH'S HOMEPAGE > JAIME'S HOMEPAGE