Havering designs

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One of my main tasks while I was working as Web Project Assistant for the London Borough of Havering was the redesign of the home page and its sub-pages. These pages had to fully take into account issues of usability, accessibility and browser compatibility. Since I no longer work for the council, and the live site is continuously changing in appearance I took some screenshots of my work before I left for posterity, including two screenshots of what the website was like before my alterations. The Havering website can be found at http://www.havering.gov.uk

HOMEPAGE: Before and after............

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SUB-PAGE: Before and after................

Click to see in full size.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some improvements:

• Removed the whitespace added in by Oracle above the top banner
• Reduced the file size of the top banners to allow faster loading pages
• Split the top banner up into a table so that I could put the logo on the far right-hand side of each page.
• Worked with another member of the team skilled in SQL to help implement dynamic coloured navigation bars for each section of the site (council, advice etc.)
• Changed the top navigational links from a block of images using an image map to text links. This meant that they could spread across the page and not be confined to the left-hand side, and it also made them more accessible as unlike the images, the text could be resized within the individual's browser.
• Amended the colours of each section so they were less drab and more complimentary of each other.
• Changed the homepage layout.

I also redesigned the top banners, replacing them with relevant images for each section of the site, but this was never implemented as I had completed the work before I left but we never got final clearance to use the images and once I had left this was not chased up. Had the banners been implemented, this is what two of the sections would look like: