Year of the Potato

Simplicity, in Practice is Hard

I was trolling my old links and I came across this post from iA last year that has a new relevance since my company is going to undertake the revamping of it's institution website this year. The current website is a messy behemoth, with subsites living on the same URL with completely different branding and running on a template and architecture that was built in 2001. In internet years, that might as well be the Bronze Age.

In starting to think about the new architecture and the types of needs that the many different programs at IIE need, I go back to the tug of too many audiences to please. On the current site, we are over loaded with copy that no one reads. It is always taken from the print bloated Annual Report. I would love to get the PR team here to think more about the online branding a part of the core identity of the organization and not a superfluous accessory. After, all the the website gets upwards of 400,000 hits a month. This is no small amount.

"Simple websites are easy to use, easy to understand, nice to look at. In practice, websites are either unusable or ugly and in general filled with too many complicated words. Why do designers have such a hard time to keep it simple?"

Read the post by Oliver Reichenstein, Simple Is Best

Makeover Magic

Before

After



So I work for a large not-for-profit that administers educational grants. That being said, the design of sites here has to tread a fine line between really boring or really bad. But I am able to take some liberties and create some interesting sites sometimes.

One of the challenges is also that we work with the US State Department and they take the Americans with Disabilities Act very seriously. We have to make sure that our sites are as compliant as they can be and that we take web standards into account. We also have an audience that is outside of the United States. In this case, the program Scholar Rescue Fund, is targeting people that may have limited internet access and have slow connection speeds. But the audience in the US has an expectation of what the web presence should look like. To solve the problem, I took the old web site that was laden with nested tables that can really take time to load and replaced them with div tags, a single top banner and drop downs that are semantic and ADA compliant.

I also had to use the imagery and the same color palette as the original site as much as I could. The program was pleased with the results. Especially since they gave me less than a week to design, revise and implement the new website. I was so glad that it was straight HTML and no interactive pages.

Link to the before site: SRF Old
New Site:SRF New