Project Four; Write up for Latin American Studies

For this project I was responsible for re-designing the conference description page for the Latin American Studies Program. The LAS program puts on a conference each year called the Conference on the Americas. This year the conference will be in its 8th year.

After looking at the previous site for this conference, http://www4.gvsu.edu/las/coa/2005/conferen-desc-2005.htm, I realized the site was to plain and had far too much text all in one block. As part of the project five I determined a complete re-design of the site would be essential to improving the overall likeability of the site.

In my redesign, I took a lot of the text and broke it up among several pages. There are a lot of great things to be read on this site, however previously they were all on one page. This was extremely hard to read and gave the reader’s eye no rest at all. The first thing I did was separate the text and break it up to the individual pages. Then I felt it was important to create a new look and feel for the site.

I spent some time working with the images sent to us and incorporated them into the site. I felt that as a GVSU site it needed to fit with other GVSU sites so I used several design and navigation concepts from other sites. This is important not only for the overall consistency of the GVSU web system, but it also demonstrates LAS has the ability to stay current with the technology the university is providing.

The second major re-design I did was with the navigation system. I moved all of the links from the top and bottom of the page to the left side. This allows easy access to all of the links and doesn’t change the location of each link when a new page is clicked on. This to me is very important as the reader will know where each link is every time regardless of what page they are on.

With the text for this site, I changed a few things with the order that information was presented. I felt it was important to provide a general overview of the conference first and then move into the descriptions and the information about the keynote speakers. I designed the page short so there is minimal scrolling so when the reader gets to they bottom they are interested in the program and can immediately click on a link to speak at the conference.

Hopefully these improvements will be well received. I feel the new site will have a very sharp look and feel to it but not overpowering. I want it to be a very clean and easy to look at site but still provide all the information needed for all audiences.