CMNS+Revamp+CC

Homework #4 - Chris Carmel

[|Clone]

[|Revamp]

The CMNS main page is already pretty well organized, with vertical three bars in simple and concise columns. It has a clean feel to it, with the navigating links on the left, which is constant throughout the site, a centered and attention-grabbing information portion in the middle, and a less busy rightmost bar which seems to contain extras that couldn't be placed elsewhere. And of course, the footer across the bottom features contact information that should be found on all webpages.

The changes I made to the design were pretty minimal. I changed all the blue links to black, and their respectively hover color to red. Continuing with that, I edited the Hot Topics section to have a more contrasting separation of the headlines' backgrounds from a faint red to a deeper red. Each of the odd headlines have the red background, and I also changed their links' hover color to white to better contrast this. The main reason for doing this was to better reflect the Maryland color palette, as well as in hopes to make the headlines more distinctly separated. Though I prefer this color contrast, I would change all the reds of the website to be more consistent with one another.

I also increased the size of site's text, especially in the navigation bar. This is to make the text easier to read and harder to misdirect. Although I dislike the hidden aspect of the drop down menus in the navigation bar, these were all Javascript based and I had exceptional difficulty tinkering with them. If I had been able to figure out how to edit those I would've made clearer which links redirect the user to another page and which links open an unseen context menu. In addition to this, because I built my webpage with a table system, I was unable to move things around with CSS only. If I could do it again, I would have use all CSS to move the resources bit to below the navigation links. For some reason, the far right bar seems like a waste of space, and what's stopping the resources links from being placed in their own navigation drop down? In regard to this, I've learned that table-based HTML organization leads to a locked-in layout, and that this is something important to take into account when designing a website of any sort.