Learning Activity – Put Thought Into Your Design – week 22

«Design a 5-page website or blog to promote your hometown (or any other place if you so choose). Present your design along with a strategy that explains the decisions you’ve made during the design process (keep the six steps mentioned in the lesson Web Design Process: Designing for Web (part 2) in mind). Remember, it’s important for us to see how you think, so explain why you decided to do things the way you did.«

My thought process:

First step for strategic design is establishing the goal for the site. I have chosen to make a front end design for my home town Gol. People looking for information about Gol are looking for recreation and activities mainly. They want to visit Gol to go skiing, fishing and biking. Therefore the sight should go straight to this information and make people want to visit Gol and spend time there.

To many, Gol and Golsfjellet is one and the same, and therefore the mountains of Gol will be my focus. My five pages will therefore be:

Homepage: A large photo of Golsfjellet, a qoute of some sort and simple navigation to:
Skiresorts
Summer activities
Accomodation
External links and general info

My audience is established in my goal above; a person looking for recreation through out door activities.

The brand image for a site focusing on outdoor activities and nature must appeal to adults with and without children. It should give the feeling of freedom, escape and adventure. Imidiately visiting the site, it should have panoramic photos taking the audience straight into the atmosphere, establishing the mood imitiately. One should almost smell the warm chocolate, the fireplace, the snow, the fish and the fresh air of the mountains. Colours should be light blues, whites and earth colours.

To solve the problem (promoting the mountains of Gol and what they can offer the visitor), I would use straight forward html/css.

To later meassure the result, we can use Google Analytics to see the numbers of people visiting the site. But we can also see the effect in increased accomotation and activities bookings.

Making adjustments later: Changing which photos we use, may change the appeal of the site and may be interesting to look into. There may possibly help to promote activities on the home page frequently and have some sort of email updates to followers in order to keep them coming back. Instagram and Facebook can work similarly.

I did some googling and found these images: