WEBSITE Design Development

Posted on

Following on from the previous assignment, my first action was to set about gathering as much feedback as possible. This resulted in several key aspects for me to address when transitioning into designing my final functional website.

A full gallery, showing each page of my website, but also my overall interface (designed in Figma).

One of the initial pieces of advice I was offered by a peer, was to address the layout of my menu bar. This is something I’ve discussed in the past, relating to my call-to-action, although this was also accompanied with an issue regarding the illustrations. Feedback suggested that people weren’t fond of the illustrations ‘cutting’ through the bar, stating that it made the images look disconnected from the websites design. When it came to creating the illustrations for the site, I chose to use smaller images as my inspiration as a way to keep the pages tidier. This accompanied with re-ordered menu bar, allowed my user to navigate the pages easier, helping to encourage the practice of Jakob’s Law (E. Stevens 2024). Ultimately making the illustrations apart of the interface as apposed to simply a decoration.

The next piece of feedback came from the overall usability of the site. A majority of trial users felt that the calendar formatting became increasingly confusing, resulting in most of the subjects feeling overwhelmed. The issue was also raised that an older person would perhaps find the design feature impossible to use. As a way to counteract this result, whilst still in-keeping with the original design, I chose to make an overlay feature. This allowed people to click on certain dates to generate a pop-up schedule of the festival events. Another usability issue that people addressed, was the lack of social media presence. Whilst the site would have older user, the target demographic was still 18–35-year-olds. Research suggested that over 76% of this age range used social media, with primarily 31% being allocated to Instagram alone (M. Sheikh, 2025). With this in mind, I chose to add four different social media links to my website.

My final set of changes when developing the website where purely practical. The first, was a design choice I made. In the early stages of developing my site, I focused heavily on the colour palette and typographical standard of my design.  Whilst navigating this key element, and ultimately settling on the font ‘Almendra’, I found that whilst pretty, the typography wasn’t legible enough. In order to not affect my ‘Aesthetic-Usability Law’ (E. Stevens 2024), I found that that best compromise was the addition of text background to help separate the colour palette of the text against that of the background images. Another small, yet practical design decision I made, was with the addition of a footer. This encouraged Jakob’s Law (E. Stevens 2024), in regard to allowing the user to see contact information for the festival. This also gave me an effective space to incorporate my stakeholders on every page of the site.

The only other decision made along the steps of this design, was the addition of a logo. This is something I addressed in my previous assignment, with feedback suggesting that a logo would be easier than a title on every page. Despite this advice, I still chose to have a title throughout my site as I felt this was more in-keeping with the ‘Law of Similarity’ (E. Stevens 2024) but compromised by also designing a logo as a call-to-action to my app.

References

Website Illustrations and Content