Site Focus: Woodend Creative Workspace
The building in which I work (for Save9), Woodend Creative Workspace, recently had a bit of a facelift for its website. The work was undertaken by Colour Creation, one of its many tenants. This project wasn’t a completely new design. It was a transformation of a simple information based website, in to a website driven by a CMS – so the admins of the building can update their information a lot quicker and painlessly.
Fresh imagery
Upon first glance, I like the new rotating banner. It provides a much needed uplift to the old imagery (which showed the building still in its development stage). It really does sell the building well.
I was a fan of the older version. It was super minimal and possessed a very clean and elegant feel. Now however, I feel the new version of this site brings with it some awful design traits and some rather baffling design decisions.
Hyperlinks
First of all, by default, the main body hyperlinks are black and bold. This is an issue for one main reason – they also use the same sized and weighted font for headings. A person with a poor quality monitor or anyone with colour impairments will have difficulty distinguishing between the two. On a further note about the hyperlinks is the visited state (i.e. what a link looks like if the user has been on the target page before) – they are underlined. If anything, the links should be underlined by default, then maybe have no underline after they’ve been visited (an underlined link stands out a lot more, and is obviously a link). On a final note about hyperlinks, the use of ‘click here’ links baffles me. It’s bad for SEO and is just generally an outdated practice.
Use of Flash
The rotating imagery on the website is powered by a Flash script. I don’t have anything against Flash on the web, although it may be departing us in the not so distant future. But for such a simple effect, a bit of JavaScript would suffice – and would be iPhone/iPad friendly – which quite a few tenants use.
Contact Form Submission
On submission of the form, when unsuccessful, the page is reloaded and the browser skips straight to the top of the page. 2005 called – it wants its lack of form validation back. End harshness.
Some other tiny little gripes
You may notice down the bottom of the page some irregularities with the pipelines and the Colour Creation link. The anchor tag has been placed in the wrong place within the text. I feel this reduces quality by showing lack of concentration.
Why is the address separated by pipelines? This will be an interesting experience for people who depend on screen reading software.
Why have HTML lists not been used for displaying lists? I haven’t seen this done in a while, and I’m quite amazed people still do this.
Last but not least, the amazing badly photoshopped team photo on the about page. I won’t give this away, but what do you think is wrong with this photo?
Conclusions
With a bit of care and attention, the beauty and simplicity of the original design could have been maintained – but all the little issues add up, and result in a poor quality site. The beauty of web design is the little details that most people overlook.
Rating: 3/10