We're building a website:The new public homepage

For the last three months I've banged on about the following things:

The general online strategy: Connecting assets to audience via content

Users and user experience

Communication between developers and clients: Wireframes and use cases

The design process

As we prepare to start working with you to upload information into our directory its time to stop being coy and start showing you exactly what the new website will look like and exactly what it will do. 

The public facing site

By now you're familiar with how the website will split in two based on audience: we have the "public facing" part that aggregates the variety of museums, galleries and Aboriginal cultural centres with your exhibitions and events, and trails defined by geography and theme. These trails will be based on existing tourism trails, local council heritage trails and independent journeys described by regional stories. Then there is the "sector facing" site that provides a hub for news, events, services and funding pertinent to the sector.

The magazine content

The homepage is the combination of everything the sector offers. In particular, it provides "magazine" articles to personalise the sector and connect your places with the greater community. These articles will structure the body of the public facing homepage.

The homepage structure

The page is split into three areas: 

- the horizontal navigation;

- the vertical side bar highlighting specific content in relation to the directory, trails   and events plus ways of contacting us (email, twitter, sign up to our e-newsletter);

- the main body featuring stories, articles, interviews, opinion pieces and news.

Horizontal Navigation 

First thing you might notice. Our name has changed.

What does the "of" signify? It's such a little change what does it matter. Well, adding "of" removes some of the government-speak feel of our name. It also goes some way to describing, in very simple terms, what's "in the box". We could have given the public facing site a magazine-style name but why make the user think. 

Click on the sector button and you immediately get access to the second half of our website - the SECTOR side (more on that in a fortnight).  



The navigation is split into our five offers:

These are also mirrored in the side bar, that, like the horizontal navigation appears on every page. 

The side bar

You may wonder why its important to have the side navigation mirroring the horizontal navigation? We asked the same thing and Adrian Wiggins from Pure and Applied (who did our website research) provided the following explanation:

"We only have a moment to connect

Most people will look at our site for less than 10 seconds, and at just one page. We need to do all we can to connect with these people, to reveal our content and features, and win them over to staying 10-20 seconds and looking at a second page. For these people we need to make our site self-evident – it's to our advantage to say the same thing several ways – it builds confidence.

We're providing multiple alternate paths for different exploration styles

When we repeat things in different modes or expressions we're catering to people's different ways of exploring, and avoiding the moment where they can't make sense of things or find a way forward. Here we're catering to several different navigation styles – readers, navigators, searchers. It's hard to say with any certainty how our visitors break down into these categories, so it's just prudential common sense to provide mechanisms for all.

• Readers consume text or visual content to understand the site; 
• Navigators understand a site by parsing the navigation and using it to explore; 
• Searchers use site search tools for particular objectives."

The body of the homepage

The body of the website homepage is made up of modules leading users to an article about a place, event, exhibition or trail. These articles are tagged under umbrella titles such as Treasures (stories about the objects, collections and the people who look after them) or State of the Art (interviews with artists or curators). 

These tags also provide the sub-navigation for the homepage. Click on any one of these tags and you will be taken to a landing page listing all the articles under that umbrella title. 

Why tagging?

We want to follow the lead of our users. Instead of an unchanging navigation we want to measure user engagement with subjects and strengthen the representation of popular content. If the public can't get enough of WWI next year then we'll make this a tagged subject heading on the front page.

In a fortnight, I'll introduce your organisational profile page.