While mind-mapping and coming up with my three directions for my wireframes I studied
usatoday.com to figure out the information they had most prevelant to my section and what they currently have and what is and is not working. I started to realize that I absolutely cannot stand their website. In moving from the main page to the subsection's main page to an article within that section, the entire layout can change every single time. No three pages are set up the same way. The organization was all wonky, in the secondary navigation, the link to the taxes, can also be found in the drop-down menu directly to the left of it. There are many things like this where things pop up in more than one spot that cause annoying redundancies. Also, the types of tags within the articles changed from article to article. Some were tags of sections, some were author tags, and some were even different from that. All of this has got to stop. Below are my three proposals.
The first set is a grid-based design with hierarchy within bigger squares.
The second set is based on a left and right scrolling page with information scrolling vertically.
The third set is another grid-based design but more open and less about drastic heirarchy through different-sized squares.
I ended up going with the second set to take further. I was drawn to it the most of the three. Marty commented on it saying that it felt very ipad-like which I completely agree with. But why can't we take the sleekness of ipad design and apply it (successfully) to website design for a computer?
