YCMHS Redesign Sebastian

Yarmouth Consolidated Memorial High School, or YCMHS had a very cluttered and busy site. There were too many navigation options, no sense of heirarchy, problems with imporperly arranged elements and chaotic and redundant content. First off, the actual name of the school was virtually buried beneath a tide of other competing elements, one of the first changes I made was to give it a more prominent position at the top of the page. Also lacking was an audience focus. The vast majority of navigation that was prioritized at the top of the page was directed towards services for teachers. In my view, teachers are a far more heavy userbase for the school website than either parents or students. Therefore many of the “badges” that have been crammed into the page can be easily eliminated. This user prioritization is also shown in the ordering of the navigation tabs, with staff placed first. The majority of content most useful to students or parents, such as what day of the schedule it is or what the caf is serving for lunch can be easily folded down into the sidebar on the right, the new method of organizing, which merged several separate data display methods into a single one, results in information that is much easier to understand and process quickly. The quicklinks section was used to highlight elements that might be otherwise confusing to find, such as the section for international students, and also to allow for quicker navigation to what I thought would be the most heavily used sections. The final important step was selecting a palate that actually represented the school, rather than the blue and orange that had been used. To pick colours I simply took them directly from the logo posted on the webpage.

Done