INTRODUCTION
This web site was created for Kuching Design Week 2011 Festival. Before design the interface of this web site, I do some research to gather the information of web design. I have surf a lot of web site about Design Week, Design Festival, Design Show, and etc. From surfing this kind of web site, I have gather the common initial information about the purpose, goals, target audience, and specific content about a Design Festival Web Site.
In addition, I have read some books about the web design either from theoretical or practical. From reading those books, I have more understand about the elements and principles of web site design.
INFORMATION GATHERING
The first step in designing a successful web site is to gather information. The certain points to consider for a web site are the purposes, goals, target audience, and content of that web site. From the information I have gathered, the purpose of a Design Festival Web Site is to provide the information about the festival, activities, events, time and location to public. The goals of the web site are sharing information about the Design Festival and attract people have particular reaction. The target audiences of this web site are students and creative interested, between 18 to 45 years old. The contents of Design Festival web site should giving related information and good to have some images.
CONCEPT DESIGN
The concept design of this Kuching Design Festival 2011 web site is simple and easy to use for visitors. From observation the principle of Less is More, this web site is using simple color and simple font. The background color of this web site is using white color to create emphasis of contents and texts. To maintain the consistent of this web site, all of the navigation buttons are easy to recognize and setting at a same place for every web pages, so that the simple look and feel has been created and it is easy for users in this web site.
PLANNING
In this stage, the site map of Kuching Design Festival 2011 was developed by using the information gathered. The site map is including Home page, Programme page, News page, About Us page, Exhibition page, Sponsors & partners page, and Contact page. Random structure has been used in navigation system so that users can go to the page what they want by simply click a button. Furthermore, all of the web pages provide a sidebar that link to other sub-topics, such as graphic design, interior design, digital arts, furniture, mural, illustration, sculpture, and photography.
INTERFACE DESIGN
The Graphic User Interface of this web page was designed by using simple white color for the background of whole page. It is to avoid the web page look too crowded and making users focus to the contents and texts. At a same time, white space providing the resting point for users.
The logo of Kuching Design Festival 2011 was designed be a straight line of words without spacing. Black and grey color use to create contrast between the words.
The typeface is simply using Arial font, san-serif make users easy to read on the screen. To maintain the consistency of web pages, all of the typefaces are using the san-serif font.
The main navigation buttons were designed having underlines to show they are clickable. To create a good interaction between users and the web site, the buttons will change color while the cursor rollover them.
DEVELOPMENT
In this stage, all of the individual graphic elements from the prototype were used to create the actual, functional web site.
First, the home page was created, and the followed interior pages have created by changing the contents using the template of home page. This method is good to maintain the consistency of every page.
The GIF animation was used at the home page because the GIF animation is more dynamic than still image and it can attract the users to surf continuously into the web site.
Some images were used in the web site. To avoid the web pages are loading too slowly, all of the images size were be minimize to lower size.
CONCLUSION
Web site design is very interesting. However, it is not as easy as people looking from the exterior. There have a lot of knowledge I have to learn in this field.
REFERENCES
Books
Frank Thissen, (2004). Screen Design Manual, Communicating Effectively Through Multimedia. Germany: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
Gary B. Shelly, H. Albert Napier, and Ollie Rivers, (2009). Web Design: Introductory Concepts and Techniques, Third Edition. United States of America: Course Technology, Cengage Learning.
Jesse James Garrett, (2003). The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web. United States of America: New Riders.
S. Todd Stubbs, Karl Barksdale, and Patrick Crispen, (2000). Web Page Design. United States of America: South-Western Educational Publishing.
Zoe Mickley Gillenwater, (2009). Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS. United States of America: New Riders.
Internet
