Patty Ho Design | Web Interactive Designer

It’s been nearly one month that I started at Canwest.  In the first two weeks, I had done tons of reading of on current HGTV.ca documentation and assessment for the new one.

My first major task was to redesign HGTV.ca. I had a great meeting with all the content people to find out what they want to see on the new site.

I also had another meeting with our technology director to go through our existing technology that we had used on our properties.

There’s few things I learned about designing corporate site especially the ones on CMS system.

1. Be Flexible with layout

Modular design has definitely become a trend in recent years. Why? because designer don’t get to put the content on the website, but editors or content coordinators do. As designer, we have to provide a easy solution for editors to arrange the content however and whatever they want on the website.

Modular design should allow content editors to remove or add content pieces without asking designer to do further customization.

Designer will be the one who is determine the look and feel of the content ‘container’. However, we should NOT design around specific content. It’s best to avoid using image for a content title. Let it be dynamic so it can be easily changed.

It is important to design a layout that can fit maximum and minimum contents and make the content easy to relocate.

2. Creating opportunities for monetization

Today, major corporate website is all about making money off traffics. Marketing will try to sell any potential advertising placement on the site.

It is important to keep in mind that we need to leave space for a sponsor logo or any custom sponsored header.

I also love beautiful backgrounds but I also have to design it in a way that it can be changed from time to time. Advertiser loves buying your website’s entire background. So make it easy to change!

3. Don’t re-invent the wheel

I guess being a designer is that we tend to customize our design and make it unique. However, design is easy, but when you hand it over to developers, they will probably want to stab you while you are sleeping because you are causing them losing their sleeps because they had to build it from scratch. So if your developers had developed a widget, but it might not be 100% the way you wanted, seriously, for the time being, just take it and skin the widget.

4. Keep the cropped image on the same ratio

If there’s CMS system behind a corporate site, the ideal way is to upload a large resolution photo once without further cropping. The CMS will do the work cropping down for you. The trick is to keep all the cropping ratio the same.

Beautiful photos are the bread and butter of HGTV. However, the image comes in with vertical and horizontal display. It needs to find a common cropping size that will keep the essence of the photo. I personally find the ratio of width 6: height 5 is the best when displaying thumbnails.

Some people prefer to use square ratio but I think it lacks of contrast.

5. Keep the design consistent, and keep it simple

With corporate website, the common problem we found that there’s too many design elements and too many information all at once. User won’t know where to read or what to read.

The design should support the content but not the other way around.

Take a look of CNN’s recent redesign deconstructed article, it gives a really good breakdown on CNN’s recent redesign, and how they approach it in a pro and con way.

It is important to keep the same design treatment through out the website. The includes usage of color, border, divider,  font family, font size, content header styling, thumbnail size, navigation styling..etc.

6. Finally…

Reading and keep up with current design trend. I often visit patterntap.com for design pattern inspiration. This is a  web2.0 era, make the user engaging your site instead of limiting it.