Small business Web sites blog

Richard Thornton Sculpture Case Study

I recently worked with sculptor Richard Thornton to redesign his Web site. The original site was around 4 years old, and while Richard was still fairly happy with it there were a few things that needed changing:

• The site was not visual enough
• None of his most recent work was on the site
• He couldn’t track visitors to the site

After looking through the site, there were a few other things I noticed too:

• There was a sculpture menu link, which although revealing a drop-down menu couldn’t itself be clicked
• None of the pages had definite headings, making it unclear which page you were on
• The links between sculptures were previous and next instead of the titles or locations of the sculptures
• Hovering over any text made it change colour

Planning the new site

Many of the visitors to the site will be from the local authorities that commission these pieces of Public Art. Most of them will visit the site after having been sent a proposal from Richard and his team. The main aim of the site will be to show examples of Richard’s work as much of the other information will also have been sent to them in the proposal.

As the main focus of the site was a visual showcase of Richard’s work the first stage was getting the photos together. This stage was a pleasure as Richard has a wide range of high quality professional photos for each of his commissions.

We also used some of the text for the old Web site alongside writing information about the newer pieces of work.

Home page

Richard wanted to showcase more of his work on the home page, as the old site only showed a single piece of work.

The new home page features 9 images from some of Richard’s favourite commissions. As soon as visitors see the home page they can see a wide range of the work he does. Each of the photos also link to the details of that commission with more photos of the commission.

Commissions page

The original site’s commissions page did a good job of showing the logos of companies and organisations that Richard had done work with, but didn’t let visitors see a range of his work.

The new site, doesn’t show the logos any more, but instead shows some of Richard’s actual work.

As well as adding more images, the new site design solved a problem with the navigation on the original site. The individual commission pages were listed under a “Sculptures” heading that couldn’t be clicked and the summary page was listed as “Commissions” in the navigation.

Sculpture details page

The details pages were the place where Richard wanted the biggest changes. The original site had a single photo of each commission with some text describing the commission. Richard wanted to reduce the amount of “filler” text while adding more photos of each commission.

The new site designs give much more of the page to photos of the sculptures.

The footer

You might have noticed by now the footer on all the new pages.

The new footer includes links to all the pages on the site, removing the need for a separate site map page. It’s useful to have a site map, but on a relatively small site it seems a waste to have a whole page for the site map when it can be made available on every page.

The footer (and the header) also include all the contact details that were previously on their own page. If you want to provide more contact details or a map then it’s useful to have a contact page. If the only details on your contact page are an email address and a telephone number then it’s more effective just to include them in the header and footer of every page.

You can also read an extended version of this case study on Google Docs.

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Tags: Case Studies, Small business Web sites

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Case Studies.