EE Menu Placements

Initial ideas for menu placements for the equine engineering website. In the emails between myself and John, he had said that he wanted a consistent theme with a drop down menu running along the top. I decided however to show him what other types of menu he could use for his site and that a drop down menu from the top may not necessarily be the most practical, since it means content from the site will be covered. Also it may be unnecessary since there aren't that many pages within the site.

Email from John:

"I’ve attached the product list that I began to do from your original design work. At the moment this is a bit light in terms of pictures and styles of jumps. I’ve got a lot of work to do in terms of prep work to get some more stuff to photograph. I’ve listed out some websites below that are existing and one thing I’ve noticed is that they are all bland! My favourite personally is the chapelstone one which has photographs of work being done. This is something that I am keen to show. The biggest area that I want to push on my website though is the planning services section as this will give me most profit to least work ratio. I want the website to me very visual and professional looking but also want it to be very easy to navigate through sections so would prefer a constant theme of a drop down menu along the top. I don’t want to have to keep pressing the back button and returning to a home page. Other than that I give you a free license. I can come up to Leeds at some point for a brainstorming session and to run through layouts etc. I will obviously have to put in a lot of input to you for the wording of things as well.

I have photos of the manege in construction and will be getting more of it in final state.

Give me a shout if you need anything else.

Here are a few show jump websites

http://www.countryside-sj.co.uk/

http://www.polyjumps.com/

http://www.jump4joy.co.uk/

http://www.classicshowjumps.com/

http://www.qualityshowjumps.co.uk/

and some manege construction

http://www.williams-and-williams.co.uk/?gclid=CNW6zdSenaQCFREB4wod0HIHDg

http://www.chapelstone.co.uk/ridingarenas.html "

Section of email from me to John:

"Also you need to have a think about your web address/business name. Do you still want to keep the name Equine Engineering Solutions or something else? I think equineengineeringsolutions.com is too long and people won't type it out and ees.com + all the varieties of that have all been taken. I'm just bringing it up now because it might be worth buying the domain name you want to use as soon as possible. Also I'll probably start the logo design this week for you so I need to know what you want to be called."

John to me:

"Equine engineering.com is the best one. I want the business logo to be the equine engineering, scrap the solutions if you want. I like the gold and green colour scheme, but I don’t mind if you want to have a play around with it. Green brown and gold are more natural countryside colours as such, but something vibrant and bright also suits the showjumps!"

John to me:

"As far as the logo goes, I initially liked the horse jumping over the name but was put off because this was a very popular style logo, if a different take on this could be done have a go.. I don’t want a logo based on an engineering design. If Liam can do some basic designs I can have a look at I will choose one then that a more detailed logo can be done on.

I want the business to look like a mid price business. The planning and construction side needs to be very professional and the jumps side needs to be personal based. I don’t want the website to appear like a commercial one. As I’ll be doing all the work myself the customer will only ever have one point of contact for whatever product they want. The jumps are all going to be made to order as well – so it needs to feel personal to the user. I don’t know how easy it is to do but the idea of having a jump builder on the site would be great. So the user can pick a jump style and then choose the colours and the size and to what standard."