The Brownsville Herald Business needs Improved usability, full responsiveness, and quality design work. Project description The purpose for this project is to improve overall usability and to enhance the reader's experience. Project schedule Framework – 4/11/2015 to 4/13/2015 Design – 4/16/2015 to 4/20/2015 Styling – 4/21/2015 to 4/27/2015 Content – 4/28/2015 to 5/4/2015 Scripting – 5/5/2015 to 5/11/2015 Start and completion dates Start date for the project is April 11, 2015. The estimated completion date is May 11, 2015. Project deliverables Newly designed website and improved usability Major activities Framework, Design, Styling, Content, and Scripting Resources BootStrap framework, various JS and CSS libraries
The Brownsville Herald is a fairly well-known news provider here in the valley. I read it on a daily basis and have opted to work with their design for my project. Currently, the website lacks that “wow” factor; there's nothing that really draws the eye of the reader at first glance. Also, the content is relatively difficult to get to and some links are actually broken.
As a current web developer working in the field, I can absolutely confirm that actual web developers/designers regularly complete breakdown documents for their projects. I have to complete one of these documents for every single project that hits my desk, whether small or large in scale. Given, I am the sole developer for the company I work for, the breakdown document is highly beneficial to me and upper management. At the company I work for, the document is generally used to inform the executive officers of what projects I am working on, how long the project will take to complete, and what individual project tasks have to be completed in order to reach a set goal/deadline. The only real drawback that I can admit to would be the time that is consumed creating the document itself.
The website I chose for my project is the Brownsville Herald, a local newspaper here in the Rio Grande Valley. The Brownsville Herald website is not bad, but it's not great either. There's a lot of design flaws, including a lack of full responsiveness. In today's world, readers want to be able to use other personal devices outside of a desktop/laptop to access the information they're looking for. If you design a website that is not responsive to a variety of devices, then you lose visitors. This isn't an opinion, it's a well-known fact. Usability is everything in design, how the user interacts with the page in a given browser is crucial. With that being said, there's not a lot of user interaction involved with the website outside of clicking links. Sure, there's a lovely flyout navigation menu – but that alone doesn't cut it. On the other hand, I do like the balance between textual information and images. I feel that balance is very important, especially with news websites. If you have too much text scattered around the page, you aren't giving the reader any sense of flow. Likewise, if there are too many images and not enough textual information, the same could be said.
In regards to improvements that I plan to make in the design, the biggest one is making the site fully responsive. The days of basic HTML structured webpages is long and gone... and it's for the better. I plan to create more user interaction capabilities that allow the user to fully indulge in what the site has to offer, from stocks to content.
References
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Wittkopf, B., & Shaw, M. E. (2003, fall). Article title from the journal. Journal Name, 43(2), 18-22. doi: 10:109.0932.9385.09 