Final Site Report

Audience

“Safe Winter Driving” was created for the purpose of educating Minnesota residents of the dangers of driving in hazardous winter conditions. Precautions and prevention are discussed, as well as helpful tips for safety.
The site was a web layout, designed with busy viewers in mind, utilizing bulleted lists and a ubiquitous navigation bar on the left side. It has a very simplistic layout, which provides a clean, tailored look. There is no clutter to sift through to get to the desired information. A user would be able to access the site, quickly scan the material and obtain factual precautions and tips without wasting any time.

Design

In addition, a common theme is threaded through the web site, portrayed with a cool blue shade within the buttons and banner. In keeping with the theme, both are designed to look like an iced-over windshield that has been haphazardly scraped.

There are several different pictures and graphics throughout the pages, which are again, consistent with the Minnesota winter theme.

While initially conceptualizing the site, our group came up with almost identical ideas. One discrepancy was the placement of the navigation buttons, which was solved by visual attractiveness. The buttons simply looked good on the left side rather than the top.

We chose five main sectors of information: facts, safety, items for your car, mechanic’s corner and weather outlook. These seemed to sum up all of the most important points and included everything we wanted to cover. The information is not greatly detailed since we chose to focus on speed and ease rather than extensive text.
Our links and tips were designed with optimum user safety in mind. We strived to give as many relevant precautions as possible, in the shortest amount of time.

We also decided to include several different visual elements in the site to keep the user’s interest. Our group placed an importance on the appearance of the pages as well as the content.

Problems

Through the design of the web site, several problems were encountered. A main concern was attempting to secure our navigation buttons in one spot. After creating separate cells for each button, we realized that they floated around to even out with the content on the right side. We had to delete each cell and button, add a new larger cell and put each button into the new cell.

We also spent a little too much time attempting to add the ice-blue color into the provenance. We couldn’t get the color to match exactly and then the banner appeared shorter than the provenance. We ultimately decided to omit the color, which also omitted both problems.

Since we are three individual people with different ideas, we sometimes ran into small disagreements about various elements in the site. Through compromising and discussion, we were able to work out any conflict.
Despite a few minor problems, our group worked well together as a team. We were all willing to put forth effort and time. Therefore, no one ended up doing most of the work, which is a common group problem.

Responsiblities

All three of us brought a design idea to the table in the beginning. As stated before, they were almost identical. We changed a few elements and decided on the layout together. We also set up the site layout together. Each of us would use the computer for a little bit while the rest of the group gave suggestions or input.

Hayley created the banner and buttons in Photoshop. She interviewed her father for the Mechanic’s Corner, composed text and scanned a photo for this section. Hayley also researched and wrote the Items for your Car page and the Final Site Report.

Amanda researched statistics, took several pictures for the site and wrote the text for the Facts section. She also created the two graphics and composed the index text for the Home page.

Jen searched for weather links and researched winter safety tips and composed the Safety and Weather Outlook section. She also incorporated everyone's text into Dreamweaver.

We all worked together as a group to put everything together. Each of us had separate responsibilities but we cooperated to create the final web site.

copyright © 2003 last updated December 2002
Amanda Hubbard, Jen Barr and Hayley Hurd