Crazy Bat Designs - Helping you reach the most people possible.

Written by Marco Battilana. CEO, Crazy Bat Designs.
Email: info@crazybat.ca
Web:www.crazybat.ca

I've had the same design since May 2004. I've felt no need to change this as I thought that the message I was communicating was effective enough. However, much like staring at the same walls in a room, I felt that a change was needed. So, I set out to redesign my site from the ground up.

To start with my redesign process, I broke down the site in the following aspects:

• Corporate Identity
• Information Architecture (IA)
• General Look and Feel (Including Layout and Content)

For part 2 of "Anatomy of a redesign", I'll discuss my thoughts on how I came up with the new Information Architecture (IA) for this site.

In terms of the IA, the focus was more on the "bucketing" of information to come up with a navigational structure.

Basically, imagine you had to group your information into buckets with some common labels on it. The excersize of coming up with the common labels for the buckets as well as placing the content into the appropriate buckets is how I visualize the best way to go through an IA excersize.

For those familiar with IA, this is similar to doing a card sorting technique with a shallow site.

Looking at the previous IA, it was broken down like so:

Home

The home page of the site

What We Do

A description of what Crazy Bat Designs can do for you

Examples

Some examples of the previous work completed

News

Intended to be the latest news either directly affecting, or in relation to Crazy Bat Designs

Forums

A public forum for others to share ideas about web and accessibility standards. As well, to showcase the phpBB WASO

About Us

A more personal look behind Crazy Bat Designs

Contact

The mechanism in which to contact Crazy Bat Designs

Colophon

Information about the thought process behind the design of the site

Once I determined the "buckets", I started to analyse the existing content within, starting with the "News".

This was a tough item to analyse. At a glance, "News" is very easy to understand what it's all about. However, I do want to keep with the current trend of "blogging" like everyone else is doing at the moment, so I decided to change the label to "Blog". I'm still on the fence with this term as it seems so, dare I say, Web 2.0. But, I'll keep it for now.

With the "Forums" label, I felt that it would be a good place for individuals to give their ideas about all things web and accessibility standard-related. As well, it would show the possibilities of taking an existing web application and giving it a standards overhaul.

However, thanks to the amount of spam that continuously populated the forums, I decided that showcasing this work would still be acceptable, but that a different venue could be used for collaboration. Hence, the "Blog" label and it's content. At this time, there are no comments enabled. But, I'll enable this once I get WordPress up and running.

The "About Us" label seemed more appropriately named as "About" as I felt it still effectively identifies the subject matter, but with less text.

The "Colophon" label had information about the thought process behind the design of the site. I figured that this could be grouped with "About" label as the information is related.

As a result, my new IA is like so:

• Home
• What We Do
• Examples
• Blog
• About
• Contact

I'm satisfied with this as it's more condensed, clearer and easier to understand.

In the next update, I'll tell you about the thought process behind the change in the site's general look and feel.

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