Research + Critical thinking and contextualisation

The original website of worcester museums contains a lot of information about a lot of museums. However, the huge amount of information sometimes confuses the user and he cannot quickly find what he is looking for. In my opinion, this website is an example of this. The information on the homepage is too much which does not give the freedom to the client.








 Comparison between the original and my website designs.







The Museum of London website has a slightly different design. It does not have that musch information on the homepage, which I think works quite well because it does not get the user lost. The homepage has some main topics from which the user has to navigate through to find what he or she wants. Indeed, this is the downside of it. With this kind of websites sometimes it is better to use google to find what you are looking for in this website rather than using the navigation in the website.

The design of the natural history museum website reminds me of the museums worcestershire design. Again, it has a lot of information on the homepage which in some cases works very nice if the user finds the information he/she is looking for on it. This is a well-known museum, therefore this type of design must be working very well with their clients.

Something completely unrelated to the museum websites I've looked at is the video copilot website design. It has a totally different layout and purpose but the simple design and easy navigation gives the user the freedom to browse through it. I was thinking would not it be interesting to make a website for the museum using the style of this website. It uses mainly visuals to navigate the user through.

These are actually all the things I took from that website to experiment with.

  Here I've put some of my main inspirational websites created from my colleagues.

 - like the gradient in the background but it makes the text at the bottom hard to read
- the positioning of the images does not seem to be successful either.
- if you scroll down, the menu moves with the screen, as if it is stuck which I found to be rather helpful
- the header is on the left side and it specifies the area where the buttons are. It is not usual for a website and in my opinion it does not look quite professional.

Another example for a layout which was not taken to a further development because I thought this would not fit a museum website.
 - like the use of typography
- like the use of background
- the header, body and footer are part of the background, which looks nice - keeps everything together.

This one is a very good design for a gallery page because it has thumbnails of all the gallery pictures which contributes for a easier navigation. Simple header. However, i dont like the little topics at each row - they are very small and hard to notice.

- like the animation of the buttons
- the picture at the top part of the body brings professionalism to the website
- pretty straightforward, easy to navigate
- well structured
- nice colorscheme





http://www.amnh.org/

http://www.villa-rustica.de/tour/tour14e.html

http://www.decordova.org/

http://www.nga.gov/collection/

http://www.museumoftherockies.org/Home.aspx


MULTIMEDIA

http://www.sbs.com.au/dragonchildren/#/the_dragon_children_homepage

 






Dreamweaver + Photoshop - Basics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7XpOzJHRU4

Animated Graphic in Flash
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oddd-bO8Dhc

Flash Movies into Dreamweaver
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opn9Q6Yksb4

Make Particular Loop
http://themographblog.com/2008/04/15/loop-particular-the-right-way/