As a student at Utah Valley University, I was tasked to pick a charity and redesign their website. I decided to pick a charity called “Best Seat in The House”. They plan events and parties for kids that are in the hospital or have any health issue that stops them from being able to have a normal childhood.
Goals: ​
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Redesign a website for a charity using basic design principles.
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Learn the steps that are done to design a well made website.
Audience: ​
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The audience for this website are the people interested in the charity. People that have kids that are in the hospital or have other health conditions as well as people that commonly donate to charities.
Let's get Started
To start this process I looked at the current website and found the problems that they have. It is hard to see the navigation bar because of the way that they did the hero image. They chose to make the hero image the about us video, but the problem is it didn’t have any sound. There is one part of the video that includes a man talking without any indication of what he is saying. It would be much better if they just had pictures of the events and kids that they have helped. I also found that their buttons are way too big. This makes the website look weird and removes a lot of the professionalism that the website needs to get donors and volunteers.
Sketches, Sitemaps, & Basic Designs
Once I knew what was wrong, I mapped out each page that I would need to design and what would be found on each. This helped me stay organized for the next steps. The next thing that I did was create some rough sketches of what my website designs would look like. I also decided to make some animation sketches so that there was no doubting what the website functionality would be. Once all that was done, I created the basic wireframes and made the colored designs!
Finishing Up & What I learned
I am really proud of the work that I did in creating this website design. When I took it to my class they seemed to really like the designs and made some suggestions to make them better. I was able to apply the suggestions they made to me and made the designs really good! This process taught me what I needed to do to make good website designs including the different planning and sketching techniques that I can use to make my designs the best.
