Presentation Boards

In context

What the site might look like once live, the alignment is left with a background colour the same cream as the branding. The menu for the website should maintain in the same position even if having to scoll down the page.

Web Pages

The website layouts as they have been resolved so far, John is happy with how they look now so the rest of the job is:
- Generate more content (John to do)
- Photograph products (myself)
- Design and Access statement layout (Liam)
- Designs for jump builder (myself)
- Code the site (myself)

Open publication - Free publishing - More website

Show & Tell

Today was show and tell, it was really good to see what everyone had been getting on with and to see how people had approached the idea of range differently. Some of the work made me really think about different approaches I could take and I was genuinely impressed with a lot of the work. Also seeing things other people had done made me realise that I had probably made similar mistakes that I could address.

Anyway, questions & answers from todays session;

Does the ‘Butterfly Effect’ brief have enough of a range?

- could propose other films

- yes, but if time expand into stationery

- iphone app if time

With the introduction in the key booklet now does that help the understanding of the work? (butterfly effect)

- yes, much better

- key and event book adds clarity

Originally each pictogram was going to be a different colour, does keeping them the two same colours work? (scuba diving)

- yes the colours work, simple & clear

- 2 colours work, perhaps change the colours to something brighter

- yes, but red is vibrant and blue is dull

- hard to know without context but would be good to see the colour options

Do the examples of pictograms work at the smaller scale? Are they clear in their meaning? (you can write on the print out)

- slightly smaller than they can go, makes lines on scuba diver thicker

- pictograms are all clear but the wall one is a little hard to get

- colours are nice but makes the smaller ones less clear

What sort of impression do you get of ‘Equine Engineering’ by looking through the website proposal?

- High end, make body type smaller

- bit dry, look at DS emotion for different spin

- colours are great, add more details

- traditional not very innovative

Any major type errors that are staring you in the face with the website?

- body copy too big

Other comments:

- have different layout on the tshirts, information could be too detailed to print on clothing

- prints have worked well

Open publication - Free publishing - More content

Update of the website with content. I had to move around some of the content and also I have been working on new pages. I think the cross country examples which are currently drawings will need to be vectorised to maintain the professionalism also the design for the jump builder need to be done, although I may not include that as part of this module since it's quite a big job in itself and really I want to continue with other work.

EE with content

Open publication - Free publishing - More web

After discussing the web design with John I've addressed some of the issues and started to fill in the layout with the correct content. I've now sent these 4 pages to him which demonstrate different features. Including; light box, pop out menu, type on its own and type with image. Once I get the feedback from these pages I'll then be able to do the rest of the pages which will follow the same rules. Apart from the jump builder which is quite a large project in itself and may have to be left for the time being.

Email from John:

"I’ve had a look at the few pages you’ve done so far and I like the layout. Under the planning and design section, the slideshow wants to be pictures/samples of the drawings and elevations which I’ll be putting on here for you and also a sample of the design and access statement. I’ve put this on dropbox now for Liam to design me a template. Did you want to chase him on business cards and letterheads as well. The material samples you’ve photographed want to come under the construction section where you’ve written we can source material for you. Other than that it all looks fine"

Notes from speaking to John

I met up with John this weekend to discuss the website progress and to talk about what needed to be done.

Within the show jump section of the website he would like a jump builder. So that clients can select different features for the jump, including decorative elements and colour and a visual will update. The hope is that they will able to save and send this to John and he will receive a sort of order form with all the details he needs to build the jump. I'm not sure what the best way of doing this is at the moment, whether to create a sort of interactive with flash or to make use of things like radio buttons. I want to try and keep this as simple as possible since I will at some point have to code it all.

Notes from what content needs to go on each page.

Design and access sheets

More decisions about content and the possibility of me doing the illustrations for the jump builder

Content/layout decisions

Automatic email form

I also photographed all of the samples of materials for the planning services so this is a list of all the photographs, what the produce is and who the supplier is.

Open publication - Free publishing - More welcome

Development of what kind of overlays to use and layout for home page and show jumps. I've decided to use a bar beneath the type for the overlays, this means that everything is still readable and relates to the bars that are used within the construction of the jumps.

For the home page I've been designing a layout for a welcome message/introduction into the business. I prefer the layouts which have a larger gap between the heading and the column(s) of type. The space this leaves gives an impression of being more expensive and of higher quality/sophistication. I'm still debating over a few decisions but I'm going to put together a sample of some of the designs and send them to John and see what he thinks.

Email from John:

"Couple of things first on the column down the left I prefer the extended green bar right to the bottom. The titles should be Working Hunter and Manege not how you’ve spelt them.

On the other slides I prefer the writing to be as one, i.e not in columns. I like Slide 8 layout."

PDF sent to John, with a selection of possible menu layouts and examples of how they might look within the window.

Starting to put together visualisations of layouts/colours/menu placements.

The layouts where I've started to look at light boxes for the images seems to work best. The colours I've used are the colours discussed with John and Liam (responsible for branding). I've been looking at different tones of these images so that they are more suitable for screen. I've found that having a site using predominately dark green is a bit over powering, and having too much of the cream starts to cheapen the brand. Making the cream slightly lighter and balancing it with the green seems to reflect the brand values more. I'm also having trouble with how to place the photographs within the site without looking like they are just plonked on. Using the light box to display the images really lifts the images out of the site and makes more of a feature of them. By doing this it perhaps shows customers that they really should pay attention to the work that EE can do.

Emails:

Me to John:

"I've uploaded a pdf to dropbox which has a sample of some of the stuff I've been working on for your site.

I've used the colours from the branding and the logo that Liam's designed. I've kept the contact details in the

same type as the printed materials but changed the main copy so it's more readable on screen.

The pdf is just looking at different menu placements, whether to use a drop down menu or side bar. I actually think

having it down the left hand side might work better because it means when the menu drops down it won't be covering any content on the page.

There's also a couple of pages on there which look at images lightboxes. This means that rather than having to scroll down the page to look at photos they can act as a sort of slide show. I thought this might be a good way to show the menage construction in progress.

The last few pages show what the website might look like once live. By keeping the pages central and using a coloured

background, the website will work for people with all sorts of monitors. Whereas if I try to fill the entire screen with the

webpage, people with smaller monitors/older computers won't be able to view the site as well. "

John to Me:

I’m not going to lie to you, Slide 17 is my favourite. I agree with your thinking of the menu popping out from the side. Please replace Costs with Prices though!

For the manege construction I really like the slide show idea and then below this I would like to give a description of works being undertaken. I’ll let you play around with it a bit more. I’m also going to want to remove the manege and leave it as just construction.

The jumps menu can be split into 3 – Showjumps, Working Hunter and Cross Country

Once you’ve sent through a few more ideas, we can look at populating the page with actual work and wording. If you are free one weekend, I would quite like you to do a sequencing of works where you photograph each stage of me constructing a jump.

The branding Liam has done for EE, and a couple of the guidelines to consider when designing the website.

To cater for the lowest common denominator it's advised to design websites at 800px wide so that people with older monitors etc don't have half the site cut off their screen, eliminating horizontal scroll bars. This means that the site doesn't take up the entire window. I think it would be best to keep it centered within the window with some sort of background behind. Here I've picked up on some of the colours/patterns that has been used for the printed promotional materials.

Using a photograph of some of their work as a header perhaps, with a drop down menu placed below that. Although it might be better to have the menu above it so that when it drops down, the only web content that is covered is the photograph. I also think it would be a good idea to have a welcome message on the home page which gives visitors a bit of an introduction into what EE do. This will then tap into the personal yet professional vibe that the company want.

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."

Product Photography

Full shot of one of the pair of jumps



Close up of the brackets used to hold the poles



Close up of how the jump is constructed/taken apart



One of the materials used as a manege filler

For the content of the website we need some shots of the product and so I have taken some of the photo's. So far I have photographed one of the show jumps and samples of the materials sourced for manege construction. This is a small sample of the shot's taken.