We're very proud to present a new Justgiving homepage, designed by our very own Will Colley (aka the designer with the brightly-coloured trainers). We hope you like it.
To mark the occasion, you can read our interview with Will. But before you do, we'd like to show you 1) a photo of Will and 2) a photo of his famous trainers:
So Will, you’ve been with Justgiving for a few months now – how are you finding it?
Great, everyone’s been very welcoming. I think that it’s because of the business that we’re in, everyone works as a team and is really willing to help, so you don’t get the feeling that you’re working alone or that anyone is too important that you can’t approach, so yeah very happy to be part of the JG team.
Did the idea of redesigning our homepage come from you or were you given a brief?
Well, I was given a brief and a fair bit of freedom to come up with something, but really it was helped along with the user testing that Liz was doing at the time. That really helped me not to get too caught up in what ‘I’ wanted the home page to look like. This is easier said than done when you’re a designer! I do try hard not to get too focused on what I want, but to try to deliver a good clear vision of what the company needs to help users to navigate the site.
What were your aims/guiding principles in the redesign?
My aims were to create, dare I say it, a beautiful page to look at that didn’t confuse the user with too much noise on the page. Meaning that the design should let the user find the things that they need without confusing them with clutter or too much visual noise. Also, a strong composition laid out in a coherent way with as much content ‘above the fold’ as was possible.
What are you most pleased with about the page?
I think that the some of the calls to action, especially the ‘Find out more’ are the most pleasing, but also the fact that the two main searches are in prime real estate areas, and that the blog is ‘above the fold’.
What are your design inspirations? What sites/designers do you like?
I get inspired by lots of things I see every day, corny as it may sound!!! Normally when I’m cycling or doing exercise.
As for sites, the guys at cpluv do a great job at posting cool stuff. Also the guys at Positive Hype are doing some very cool stuff, and Fadi and Marco with their team at Pod1 do some really inspirational client work.
What are you working on next?
Well we are totally focused on Version 3 (aka v3) of the Justgiving site. At present, I’m researching everything from navigation to footers, layouts - you name it I’m checking it out. So I’m trying to move away from client work and stay focused on v3. Knowing that we have a really good designer called Nick joining us next week, I hope to be able to make a serious dent into the v3 beast. Mind you going to Italy next week… :-)
