Once again, my SCA involvement is providing some nice practice for the business world.
I've been asked by a young person to help him learn about graphic design, for the local chapter's website.
For some reason, the website changed, after the previous webmaster left. I'm not sure why it was felt necessary - but what needs to be an informative, easy-to-use, attractive web presence now looks like an 80's metal band tee shirt. Nothing wrong with that per se...but the SCA is about historic recreation, of the pre-1700 kind. (Not so much the late-twentieth century.)
I don't want to discourage him, and I don't want to do the work for him - but I do want to show him how to find some examples of excellence, and I want him to understand:
- how strongly design work communicates.
- what the group is about to the larger organization, which has to coordinate future events with group members and needs information;
- what the group is about to the public from whom it recruits and to which it represents the larger organization, so it has a duty to be fairly serious;
- what the group is about to its own members, who would like a place to have group photos and history recorded, so they can brag on the group.
I've written up the last three points, with suggestions on how that might be done, but for the first one, I need to collect an updated list of websites. When I was first figuring out how to think about unattended web communications (which is of course what a site or a blog is), I spent a lot of time reading the pros and just surfing around, collecting good ideas, developing an eye. Of course that list will be very different, and again, I don't have to do the work for him...but he needs to be shown, "this here? This is very good. So is this. Not so much this other."
After sending him a short email asking essentially, "how serious about help are you?" and getting back a "give me everything!" enthusiastic response, I dumped the following on him. We shall see how what he does with it.
First - I can see that you have lots of ideas, and you like being creative. That's fantastic! Consider this:
- It is great to find your passion and work towards learning everything about it, but practicing your passion indiscriminately is not a stepping stone to success.
- One really good idea is always better than six. Always see if you can accomplish what you need with one creative idea.
General advice for you:
Establish your own website, and try things out there. Keep everything, so you can see how you've grown. Test things. This is a good place for your phoenix. This site will become your portfolio, with time.
Spend as much time looking at other people's work as you do playing on your own. Look at all the other Shire sites in our kingdom. Look at ones from other kingdoms. Join a "webmasters" list, if it exists, and ask what sites are really good. (If it doesn't exist, consider starting one!)
Look at non-SCA sites, thinking about how they work - not from a code perspective…you'll learn code and tricks as you go. From an organizational viewpoint. This is much harder to be good at, and is truly ARCHITECTURAL. I have several architecture school classmates who do information architecture now - the skills are quite transferable.
Criticisms of the website as it stands today:
It is busy - too many ideas going on at once. You have a fire. And you have a fantasy phoenix. And you have a shire device. And you have a lot of text. And pictures of people, or book images…you get it now. Too much competing with each other. First, cut down the types of content to the absolute bare essentials, then add ONE pretty thing. For example: Greet's Middle Ages has just the brooch on the top - which I chose carefully to represent my persona focus, and that's why it has that blurb describing it. I chose the title font to support that persona. I chose the color to support it - woad is navy blue. One idea: 6thc Kent. What is the one idea for the PG website:? I'd suggest: PG has interesting people.
It doesn't look "historical" - "metal band t-shirt" comes to mind. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it's not useful for someone's first view of the SCA. Remember, every little design choice you make communicates - help yourself by reducing the number of choices, and then you reduce the opportunities for MIS-communication.
Many links don't work - Google "Firefox link checker", this will help you find broken links to fix.
Remember to keep your screen image size/resolution to 800x600 - this will help download time and many people are limited to smaller screens - laptops, etc. Reduce photos to jpgs of a size that will allow them to load fast.
Choose clear fonts over fancy fonts - what you're doing with one fancy initial is a good approach to a fancy fonts, but you could get away with one per page. It's period! The study of fonts is one worth doing, by the way, and there's links below that will help you.
My own approach would be, take it or leave it:
Theme: Phoenix Glade has interesting people.
Collect a lot of photographs of PG people doing stuff. If they're old, that's okay, though of course keep an eye out for new photo opps. Match a photo to each topic of information: fighter practice, project night, events, demos, etc. Stick all of those photos in one montage, and put that on the splash page. That and the shire arms would be the only graphics on the first page - do everything else with LIMITED color and LIMITED fonts. Make the montage an image map, with popup captions sending people to other pages: a fighter practice page, etc. Duplicate these links on the basic page, so that people who can't see an image map can still use them.
On the second level, decorate each page with the SAME photo from the first page. Repetition helps people see things they might have missed, and be sure they're in the place they meant to go. You could add some explanatory things here - like for fighting, a sidebar blurb(like on my Kentish brooch) about knights wearing white belts, if your picture has a knight fighting. Something that makes the picture more understandable and interesting to people who don't know what's happening in it. For project night, you could have a cropped picture of an illuminated scroll, together with people working on that, or maybe the people picture is of people casting, then a picture of the museum piece they were working towards. Add a blurb to explain, and then have text about project night, where/when it is, maybe a list of things that people have made there. The top ten things, with lots of variety. Also you could list the people who have done those things.
Do not make people hunt for stuff in ordinary problem-solving tasks-they get annoyed. Make a list for yourself of what the problem-solving tasks are, and try to minimize the hunting. Ask for help with this - it's very hard to design something entirely from one point of view - boy, do I know this!
I've thrown a lot at you, and I don't expect you to understand it all right away, or make changes right away. Please don't be discouraged. You're making all the common beginner mistakes, which means you're progressing along the path, which is good. Keep your eyes open, and try to maintain a beginner's mind - imagine how things look to people who don't know the things that you know.
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Some pro websites, which will help you with content as well as design:
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Some SCA-functional things to think about - this is where the ARCHITECTURE comes back in. (I know corpora has a bunch of web-specific requirements to incorporate, too - nobody said this'd be easy. :D) Writing this framework gave me the idea for the photos-of-people-based approach described above. You may want to write your own, but you're free to use this.
Things an SCA group's website needs to accomplish:
MOST IMPORTANT - Serve the kingdom/populace about the group.
NEXT MOST IMPORTANT - Serve the public about the group.
LAST MOST IMPORTANT - Serve the group about the group.
Serve the kingdom/populace about the group:
- because the group holds events, and outside people rely on the website to get information, and to get there. The Shire isn't a shire if events aren't supported by attendance, and attending SCAdians are a lot less work than newbies at an event. Right now, especially, PG is getting kingdom/populace support, so as a designer, give that interest what it needs to support PG.
--Event information and contact info for that event.
--Contact information about group officers, for future planning.
Serve the public about the group:
- Recruiting. Let's examine this further - if I were completely ignorant, what are the fewest and most basic things I need to know:
--Funny clothes and strange activities are cool. (Need compelling pictures of this, without digging.)
--What events there are to do, when are they, and how to get there: Fighter practice/demos/project night/events.
--Contact information for further questions. Reference to Yahoo! List.
Serve the group about the group:
-Recordkeeping: business meeting minutes, historian stuff (newspaper clippings, photo archive,etc.)
-Contact info - this is already covered by the above.
-Maybe other things? Not sure, this is just a first pass in my own thinking.