CultureMob Refinement
For the last couple years, I’ve been working on CultureMob.com; mostly as a side project, but I’ve been on full time since last November. Designing and maintaining a site of this magnitude on a part-time schedule is something that I’ve learned is, as we call in the industry, a “no-no.” With so much fluid development, anything but your full attention will lead to cruft.
So I had a moment (along with Chadwick and input from Mike & James) to fix some of the issues that I had with the site.
LOOK AND FEEL
We got rid of the map in the background and removed the overabundance of gradients. The previous design looked nice on paper, but the site needed to be a little bit more utilitarian and gender neutral. It’s damn tough to design a site that is everything to everyone; and we were finding that people were overwhelmed by the “military” feeling of the map. “We’re talking about brunettes, not fighter jets.” I don’t want to fully take away the personality of the site, but I can’t have the design detract from the information.
INCREASED USABILITY
The typography of the site needed to be reigned in. We made the header elements clearer to call out the sections. Also, we made the links on the site more consistent. From an emotional standpoint, I think I like the links alter the “feel” of the site a little more than I’d like; but it’s necessary for the site to be clearer to our users as to what is a link and what is not. It’s absolutely fundamental.
IE6
It pains our developers that we still have 18% Internet Explorer 6. We spend a considerable amount of development time making sure that the experience in IE6 is as close to as enjoyable as it is for Firefox as we can make it. With these changes, not only will IE6 load considerably faster, but it will also reduce the number of complications that our devs will run into.
So take the site for a test run. We’ve recently added a handful of other great new features. Let me know what you think of the changes…
