Designing Our Future

By Michael Cole On May 6, 2008 · Leave a Comment

For the past month we have been planning and designing RightSite every day. But it has all been through words.

Today we got our first look at a visual plan for RightSite, and what we saw was the future shape of our website. The approach that we are taking to design the site, is to begin with three different design concepts. You can see these concepts in the files attached to this page.

From these three design concepts we will choose one general concept, and then suggest ways that we might refine and revise it. For instance, we might like Layout 1 best of all, but prefer the colour scheme in Layout 3. So we could then look for ways to revise the colour scheme of Layout 1 to incorporate colour concepts from Layout 3. We could design and review three more variations on this revised version of Layout 1 and see what we get.

Through a few generations of this process, we should eventually get a very detailed picture of what we want our site to look like.

For now we are only looking at the home page, but we will also develop detailed design templates for the search results pages, advanced search pages, detailed listings pages and the company site pages. That’s a lot of design templates.

However, the design concepts that we put together for the home page should apply to much of what we’re doing on the other pages. (So we had better get this first one right).

We’ll be having a focus group meeting this Thursday to review the various designs, and I’ll be sure to let you know which concept is the lucky winner.

Until then, I hope you’re enjoying whatever you are up to as much as I’m enjoying putting together RightSite.

Have fun and see you soon here on Mingtiandi.