Portfolio Design Exercise

This is the first flow diagram i came up with when deciding how my Hotglue portfolio was going to be structured. It is very basic with each page connecting to the homepage. The weekly reading page is the only place where further pages can be accessed.

First Design

This is the first design i came up with for the homepage of my Hotglue site. It shows a welcome sign with images next to it for design. Below the image in the left hand column is the different pages you are able to access once clicked. The weekly reading is along the right hand column and shows the different papers i have read about. The middle previews the content such as text, images, video and audio dependent on what page is currently accessed.

Joe Cutlan - Digital Media 2015

Second Design

This is the second design i came up with for the homepage of my site. I thought the first design was too basic and had the same structure as the majority of websites. I decided to design two separate menus. The left menu having links to sections like 'Processing development' and 'Mobile development' and the right menu just focusing on the reading tasks for each week.

Final Design

This is the final design i came up with and ended up using for my site. It displays all the pages along the top of the site which are all easily accessed. In my opinion this looks the most professional and allows me a lot of space to manipulate my content such as text, image and audio. It also allows me to keep the same design across all pages.

Summary

Sketching out different ideas on how my site will be structured and how it will look has been extremely helpful. It has allowed me to see how things will potentially look and work when i actually come to implementing the idea. I believe that i would have struggled to of come up with a suitable design/structure for my Hotglue site had i just tried to implement straight away rather than sketching out ideas. I believe my final design works the best as it seems easy to navigate and the web pages are parallel to each other for every section. Also the hierarchy of the site has remained the same from the original sketch. This is because i am able to display all the sections on my homepage, allowing for easy access to other users.