So…
The website I develop and maintain is going through a resign, primarily the look and feel and the navigation.
A bit of background and for those who don’t know me, I work for a land-grant university on the east coast of the US. I am the webmaster and sole web developer for their main website (which has around 30K pages to it). I am relatively new to the web field, although I have been in the IT industry for over 10 years.
Back to the redesign….we are working with a design agency for this little exercise and they are charging us a lot of money for the priviledge. A week or so ago, they presented their first “concepts” to us.
Seriously….I was S-H-O-C-K-E-D!
For the amount of people on their team and the amount of money we are paying them, I am shocked with what they presented to us. So we told them to go away and make some adjustments. Yesterday they presented version two of the concepts.
Again, I am S-H-O-C-K-E-D!
I am not a graphic artist, hell, I wouldn’t even call myself a web designer yet. But even I can see what they are sending is trash. Yes, it’s a strong word. But that’s how I feel.
It is so not worthy of consideration I think all we can do is trash what they’ve done and ask them to start again, or find another design agency.
So anyway, of course I am now starting a design hunt. What looks good…what is our competition doing…what is new and hip and hot. So I will probably be posting any resources I come across that I think are noteworthy.
I found one such resource today – webdesignfromscratch.com. Excellent for current web design trends! Simple, detailed explanations. According to this website, current trends are:
* Simple layout
* Centered orientation
* Design the content, not the page
* 3D effects, used sparingly
* Soft, neutral background colors
* Strong color, used sparingly
* Cute icons, used sparingly
* Plenty of whitespace
* Nice big text
Well, right now Design Agency X (let’s call them that, shall we) is in contravention of 5 out of 9 of these trends!
Will keep you posted.
