Design Report
Let's be honest here. Everyone knows I couldn't have done this on my own. So after 16 painful hours spent in East Lansing with a tutor, here it is - my personal website, the Carly Alden site.
Purpose/audience
This site is a personal website used as a hub for me, Carly Alden's online presence. The intended audience will be broad - including family, friends, colleagues, and potential employers; therefore it must reflect Carly Alden in a professional manner. Many employers examine the Web presence of potential hires as an addition to resumes and the discovery of damning photos and blog posts can ruin their chance of receiving a job offer. On the other hand, a well-developed professional website can stand out to prospective employers and give applicants a boost. Given the necessity of appealing to a professional audience, there could be a tendency to strictly regulate and target the content of this website; this would make the site less interesting to family and friends, so a balance must be found.
Design strategy
This website makes use of a simple and clean design with only a handful of pages, effectively presenting information about me without overwhelming visitors. The content of those pages, "About Carly", "Future Plans", and "Photo Gallery", is centered around me but not to the extent that it paints her as an ego maniac. An earthy and neutral color palette was selected to strike a harmonious aesthetic chord for the anticipated broad audience.
The logo and "blurb" provide clear identity that this page is the homepage of Carly Alden, and briefly describes what visitors will expect. This is helpful because Web users have a limited attention span and it is important to get the point across quickly.
Site navigation is provided in a vertical column alongside the content, in a location that falls alongside standard Web conventions. The "Design Report" link is separated from main navigation, because it is temporary and not logically associated with those other sections.
Contact and copyright information is situated in the site footer, as this is a fairly well-known standard for those pieces of information.
Verdana was chosen as the primary typeface for navigation and content. This typeface, designed specifically for screen presentation, is ideal for its readability. Georgia, a sans-serif type, is used for h1 elements as a way to contrast them from the rest of the copy.
Production costs
This is a fairly basic website with only a handful of pages, falling in the lower spectrum of website requirements and therefore will have a reduced cost compared to other projects we've done in this class. I interviewed one of my friends, David Mulder, in order to more understand the process and production cost of this type of website. He said the following:
Time will be spent developing the mental concept, including information architecture and strategy, and then on design and actual site production. If this website used more server-side technology, like importing RSS feeds from blogs or your Twitter account that would add time to the development cycle.
- Concept phase: 6-8 hours
- Visual design phase: 4-6 hours
- Site production & quality assurance: 6-8 hours
Total: 16-24 hours of time spent concepting, designing, and developing this website. At a realistic market rate of $60/hour, an independent Web consultant would likely bill somewhere between $960 and $1440 for this project.