Sunday, October 13, 2013

Travelling website - How to design the home page?



Main function:

1/ Slideshow: comprise many photos, each photo would be an opportunity to promote a feature of Nurhikmah's service. The photo could represent a special tour, special discount or certain outstanding features Nurhikmah want to promote.

- Slide description: by default will appear in short form but will show expended version with more detail while hovering. Upon clicking on this feature, users are directed to respective page.

- Short commercial video: Strongly recommend this feature for client website. With numerous competitors offering similar products, instead of getting customers surfing tediously, a short 1-3 minute video is a great way to describe exactly what the audience needs to know and what Nurhikmah want to offer. This feature will appear on the same position on each slideshow's photo

2/ Menu: Menu is traditionally put on top of slideshow. Personally, I think people get used to the menu that way. I try to avoid putting menu bar on strange place that could confuse users especially from older generations.

3/ Travel, Support, Useful Info: study from current website, I notice these 3 features are among important features and tell much about Nurhikmah's way of business. On hovering, more information will be show on each of the feature and upon clicking will direct user to respective page.

4/ Grid: the grid is a slideshow-like function that including 2 main features, grid01 on the left and grid02 on the right with social media banner under grid01.

Depend on the objectives of Nurhikmah admin teams, content od grid01 and grid02 will be changed respectively. Upon hovering over certain sub-features on the grid, the information is dynamically changed to stimulate good impressions from users.

Incomplete grid shape: personally, I think a complete grid is not as appealing as an incomplete grid but it would depend on client's ideas for the final product.

5/ Footer: including newsletter, address, sitemap. Newsletter is positioned here not to hide but I would suggest upon entering the website, a pop-up would show up and ask whether users want to receive newsletters from Nurhikmah website with lots of benefits (example: deal.com.sg). I think this is far more effective. 


Conclusions: Home Page is probably the most important page in a website. The more interactive to engage users, the more features to show offs, the better business client gets. The designs aim to follow instructions with careful consideration/assumption on client's branding objective and their potential customers.