Our group was in charge of redesigning the NICE website. NICE has a pretty good website, so we were able to focus on specific areas rather than needing a complete overhaul. Once we decided which areas we wanted to tackle, we split the work up among group members. We each designed our separate section, while staying in constant communication on all our decisions. I handled the website’s homepage, Patrick reformatted the Journey of a Refugee page, Jen came up with ideas for the Donation page and Kendall helped with the overall writing and consistency throughout our pages.
With the homepage we realized this is going to be a visitor’s first impression of NICE. We established that our audience would be potential donors and volunteers. For this reason, the goal of the homepage is to get our audience clicking and further into the site. With this in mind we decided what the homepage needed most was simplicity. By taking out a lot of unnecessary content and reworking it somewhere else in the website, the homepage became neat and inviting. We decided the most consequential elements for our audience would be the donation and volunteer tabs. We moved them right below the opening picture and blurb of what NICE is all about. We removed everything else that felt cluttered and relocated it under another tab of the site.
Another change we made to the homepage was an area to insert your email and join the newsletter. For NICE, collecting emails will be extremely helpful. Being able to send out updates not only gives their potential donors/volunteers more insight into NICE, but also is a helpful reminder of what NICE is up to and what they can currently do to help NICE. We placed this email insertion tab within a box that overlaps the front picture slideshow. The slideshow of pictures below the email box used to shift the page when images of different sizes came up in rotation. We decided this was distracting and made the picture sizes consistent.
The other page we made significant changes to was The Journey of a Refugee section. All of the boxes explaining different steps in the process used to be different sizes. We found this aesthetically displeasing and reformatted all the boxes to be the same size. There was also a grey box at the top of the page that we shifted down to the very bottom and took out of grey. Another text blurb that had been in a sole green box, we removed and let stand alone as text. These reshaped boxes and text made the whole page much more pleasing to the eye. We also relocated this entire page so that it was its own section, under the about tab. Then for the donation page, we simply broke it into two columns, adding a spot for there to be a thumbnail linking to the list of donation items needed.