WEB REDESIGN

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objective

​Redesign your hometown’s website to be responsive for mobile and desktop with a focus on travel and tourism. 

my role

​Lead Designer, Research

skills acquired

Sketch

This project was my first experience designing visuals for a website. I redesigned Colville, Washington’s website to appeal to a younger outdoorsy audience while maintaining and improving its functionality for local residents through simplified navigation.

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Encouraging Exploration around Colville, Washington

I grew up in Colville, a small logging town in northeast Washington. Its website at the time this project began was an HTML skeleton and a mess of broken links. Current tourist traffic comes to Colville for hunting, fishing, camping, or pass through on the way to Canada. With so many places to explore in the secluded northeast corner of Washington State, my hometown has potential to attract new visitors with a better web presence.

The aim of this website redesign was to increase interest about the area in a younger, active audience by emphasizing outdoor activities.

Research

Municipal websites contain a vast amount of information for different types of users—primarily local residents who need to pay bills and citizens involved in local government. Many sites suffer from appearing too clinical and un-designed, dissuading visitors from learning more about the city. 

​Colville is the largest city (at 4,765 citizens) in the tri-county area and acts as a hub for local government and events. The city is surrounded by miles of farmland, mountains, lakes, and rivers that provide many quiet campgrounds and hiking trails for locals and visitors. Competitive research revealed the websites of smaller neighboring towns to have a significantly greater focus on visitors. ​​

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census Redistricting Data (Public Law 94-171) Summary File.

The idea was to present Colville as the must-visit stop compared to competitors by highlighting its events and its central location to everything.

Concept

My first iterations took the idea of a hub, a center to the area and translated that into a circle motif. As I grew more comfortable using Sketch, I started over, spending extra time researching web design trends and landed on something much simpler and more interactive.​

​The homepage of a website should engage the reader. Because Colville’s original website was so stark and lifeless, I wanted to create a refreshing and welcoming experience.

Tone of Communication

To get an idea of Colville’s “personality”, I surveyed current residents to hear their impressions of the area. Common adjectives that were used included:

beautiful, serene, remote, charming
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​I took these keywords as a direction for my final visual design. Hero images of open the open landscapes would reflect the beauty and serenity of the secluded town. The color scheme I chose contrasted calming blues with a cheery orange. The fonts chosen were used to express that friendly charm, and I added illustrated icon elements to give it a more personal touch.
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Home

​I opted for a scrolling home page that animates and fades as the viewer scrolls down the page. It puts the landscape front-and-center accompanied by bite-size pieces of information about the area. The short scrolling experience ends with a call to action, an invitation to visit Colville and explore what they have to offer.

Visit

The goal of the Visit page is meant to introduce the audience to city and presents them with a taste of what they can do there. It leads to the tertiary pages where visitors can find information on lodging, places to eat, and more things to do.

The page is organized to highlight regular community events, typical things to see and enjoy in town, and the final big events that draw residents from across the tri-county area. It gives the visitor a clear picture of the community before exploring the surroundings for themselves.

​Navigation

The hamburger menu on desktop was inspired by the current trend that mimics navigation used on mobile. The links within have been condensed to address users seeking information about the local government and those wanting to visit the area.

Stay

The Stay page invites and encourages the visitor to find their own special place outdoors. I organized the page from campgrounds (all outdoors) to resorts (mostly outdoors) to hotels (indoors).

​Because there are so many options in the area, I didn’t want to bombarb the visitor with all the information at once. I chose to use collapsing boxes with simple lists and links to websites (when applicable) and directions.

​Similarly, the Resorts section contains information that is revealed when the mouse is hovered over a square.

Mobile Adaption

The adaption of Colville’s new web design to mobile included slight changes to interactivity and information organization. For example, the homepage scrolling experience was traded for swiping on mobile. Some buttons were also enlarged to encourage tapping.

Reflection

Municipal websites are often utilitarian and un-designed. This site needed high quality photos of the landscape, a friendly color palette and font pairing, a welcoming and inviting message, and clear navigation. Navigation needs to be simple for users of all ages. Its functions should take into account visitors as well as local residents. Rural locations like Colville have the advantage of being surrounded by nature. City websites should reflect the personality of the area and showcase their home to the world.

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After this project began, colville.wa.us updated their website.