Design a website? Why, don't mind if I do!

An exciting opportunity arose at work last week in the form of re-vamping our Education and Development department website. Currently there are two websites - this one for our Bromley site and another one hosted on our intranet for the Woolwich site - the two departments have now merged and need one single website, and our existing library website will also be hosted here.

The way it came about was that I was recently involved in designing a logo for the E&D department, using the same Wordle applet I used for our Library & Knowledge Services logo. Everyone is mad for word clouds at the moment and Wordle is a quick and easy way of creating them. The management team got everyone to contribute words and concepts for the cloud then I spent a number of hours (I won't say how many!) playing with fonts, colours and designs. Along the way I also discovered the NHS colour palette and in the end we focused on colours which matched this palette - blue, aqua, purple and grey.

Anyway somehow this has now made me the go-to girl for all things design-wise (not that I'm complaining!) and when the IT guy in charge of re-vamping the website asked for some design input my manager volunteered me for the job. It's the best of both worlds for me really - I get to play with pretty design stuff, which I love, and somebody else will take care of the coding! I had a good chat on the phone last week with the guy in IT and so far the only requirement he has is that the pages should be 990 pixels wide. We'll be using the same Joomla! program I am used to with the library website (although a more updated version) and he has installed a open source Photoshop-like program on my PC called Gimp for images so I'll have fun playing with that. So far I am thinking we should use the colours in the logo, and maybe incorporate some photos of staff in the department training.

Just gotta dust off my Information Architecture for the World Wide Web book now...

A new library website

Tomorrow (18 May 2011) sees the launch of a shiny new website for SLHT Library & Knowledge Services. The library manager at PRU and myself have been hard at work over the last few weeks and months getting all the pages ship-shape to launch for Knowledge Awareness Week 2011. We have been fortunate in that we only had to adapt an already-existing website but has still been quite a challenge deciding what to keep, what to get rid of, how the whole thing should be organised and how to make it visually appealing!

The website is run on the open source content management program Joomla! , which I had no experience of previously but I found it pretty easy to use. We decided quite early on that we didn't want just text and had the idea of using blue textboxes of varying hues for people navigate round the site. One of the trickiest parts was trying to get these boxes all the same width and height as they are all dependent on each other.

We also had to agree on the language used across the site and ensure everything was consistent across all the pages, like what pages should open in a new window and having hover-text over links. It's always the small things that take the longest!

However the last documents were uploaded today and linked in so it looks as though we have ourselves a website! I am pleased with it and really glad to have something decent to present to our users that they can use on and off-site. Now we just have to make sure everyone knows about it!