Visual Navigation (What am I looking at?).

The site is colourful, great! Colour is good, it’s exciting it promotes dynamism. However, when I look at a page with so many colours clashing, green, yellow, blue, red, black and white in large chunks, I can’t work out what I am supposed to be looking at. I can’t work it out because there is nothing dominant. The red and the blue are quite strong, but I think I’m supposed to be looking at the white bit with the content in it.

The site needs to train my eye to look at what it wants me to look at. It doesn’t do that when I get there. What it does is it presents me with a plethora of colourful choices and says, we are all here we are all equal, click all of us! So I don’t click anything, I leave the page. Don’t make me think.

When I happen to click on something I go to a new page. Good stuff, all the navigation stays similar. BUT WAIT! There’s more, when I get to a new page I’m presented with a title of the area I am in eg. “Justice, Global & Ecumenical Relations”
wow, now I know what’s going on a bit more. Oh and look, there’s another navigation style… the breadcrumbs. I wonder why they put that there. Not that I need it, that section is highlighted already on the menu button I just clicked.

Now, I’m looking to go further within the subcategory, so I look on the blue “quick links” area… which has changed into a submenu, a red submenu. Wait, it didn’t do that before, again I have to think.

Forgetting the submenu, I look to the right to find out the content of the page. So I see that the sections on the submenu relate to the content in the white area great. But they don’t seem to relate in heirachy.

I have made a little image, or re-design of what the site could do to make the heirachy a little different. I haven’t included everything on the site in the image but it gives you a view of what you CAN achieve, and what could make an average site with good content, a GOOD site with good content.

http://www.brownbox.net.au/images/canadianchristian.jpg

as for RSS…. well I forget.

Along the same lines of RSS is podcasting your sermons and/or any online worship music you may have. it uses the same type of XML framework but is not nessearily a RSS feed. We are implemting both into a redesign of our church website.

Thanks!

I’ll accept any well-deserved derision, if you could just also give me a degeekified pointer or two.

Thanks.

PS — do you know your process rejected my email address as “spam-like” because it was Yahoo!? Yikes!

Many, many, many thanks for your support of the UCCan website!

Blessings and peace – Richard B.

deb

http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/