Review of IceCaves.net's LayoutWritten by: Livio | Livio shares his views about IceCaves.net's layout's issues, its navigation problems, and how to fix them.

Last December, I began to put serious effort into designing a new layout for my website, and this got me thinking a lot about the subtleties of web design. Since then, I've noticed a lot of things that I don't like about IceCaves.net's layout, and I'm going to post all my complaints here so that hopefully other webmasters can learn from them.

And by the way, no offense to my brother Haily, who made this current layout.


Confusing Navigation

Unlike many of IceCaves' active members, I am not used to the current layout and its form of navigation, which means that I can look at it from the point of view of a newcomer. And I have to say that it's just plain confusing. What makes it confusing is that as you move through the site, links change and move around. Traveling between IC's departments makes the black quick links in the header change, the links at the top of the page that link to the other departments move around, and the sidebar displays an entirely different set of links. The result is that if you are completely new to the site, you could very easily get lost.

With navigation being the most important part of any website, more thought needs to be put into keeping it simple. This issue is so complicated that it's actually the result of several different things, which I will address individually in the following next sections.

The Problem with Departments

The first step to fixing the navigation issues is to redefine the core organization of the site's major sections. Right now, IceCaves is divided among its several departments, with each department in its own sub-domain with their own sections and links and layout tweaks, almost as if they could be their own independent sites. However, to the user it is very unclear that there even is a department system. Look at the top of the page, the links to the departments are in a super-tiny font size, as if you weren't expected to travel between departments very frequently. But in fact, during a typical visit, the user may pass through several different departments in just a few clicks. Because of this, the user may become overwhelmed by the seemingly unnecessary changes in navigation.

I know the header changes are meant to clearly state which department you're in, but to be honest, I rarely notice these changes, and it's probably partly because no one would expect it to change.

To fix this problem, you need to turn these departments into mere categories. To get an idea of what I mean, look at CNN.com. They too divide their site among different sections, but these are clearly listed at the top of the page and there are no major changes when you switch between these categories.

The Sidebar

I think you try to link to too many pages at once. It's useful how it only shows the links necessary to the department your in, but it's simply impractical to show all those links there. No one's going to be very excited to read through all of that either. Perhaps it would be interesting to only link to a few pages, and have those pages link to all subsequent, less important pages.

Also, it's not very clear that clicking on those banners on the sidebar will expand to more links. The average user might mistake them for large buttons of the site's sections, and because of this, they will be further confused when they see that those links change. And there's not even an alternative for those who have JavaScript disabled.

The Top of the Page

I don't really like the top of the page. The banner images are interesting, but there's too much contrast. I found myself liking the banner for the Blog department the most, simply because it was so smooth and simple to look at and it had good white space. In comparison, the other banners hurt my eyes, and they make that area look more cluttered. I also don't really understand what the online members box is doing there.

The black quick links at the bottom of the header should really be used to link to the major sections of the site, as I suggested before.

But the thing I hate the most about the top of the page is that tiny text. You have the links to the major sections of the site AND the log in/register buttons there. It's as if you're discouraging these things, especially when they are probably the most important and most used links on the site.

Images and backgrounds

Like I said before, some of the backgrounds on the site have too much contrast. This creates eye-strain and brings the background to the foreground, where it clearly doesn't belong. A perfect example of this is the banner image of the homepage. There are also images used where solid color may have been sufficient, or even better.

Here's an interesting example: scroll down to the very bottom of the page. The bottom-most line of text can be pretty hard to read because of the background image behind. Not to mention the fact that there's already a ton of links to affiliates crammed in that little area, the background images of the surrounding banners add even more contrast and weight to the area, when what they should be doing is providing breathing room while simultaneously acting as a separator. Now compare that to the dark gray horizontal banners surrounding the advertisement nearby. Ironically, this looks much better than the blue images that you have surrounding the affiliate links.

Needs Some Breathing Room

And finally, everything kinda feels cluttered. This is because of a number of things: background images tend to act like their in the foreground, everything seems to be crammed into their areas, and there just isn't much spacing between elements. At least it doesn't feel super-cluttered, but it could use some improvement.

Some Final Thoughts

If there's anything I learned while redesigning my site's layout, is that web design is not easy. More than half of the skill is to merely be able to recognize the problems with your design. Even if you can do that, you'll then have to deal with dilemma after dilemma.

With all of this stuff said, it's pretty clear that this layout is broken beyond repair. It would be interesting to redesign the layout from scratch, but that is something that Haily isn't very motivated to do because it doesn't seem to him like such a drastic problem, even though I hope that I have just proven the severity of the situation.

However, if any of you have any ideas on what a new layout should be like, please discuss them in the comments below.

   

| Written by: Livio | Added: Feb 23 2010 | Last Modified: Feb 23 2010 | Views: 489 | (Log in to rate) |

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