Analyzing Original Website

From receiving the brief and analyzing it for a summery I decided to have a look at the original page and note what I thought of it to help me work out how better to improve it.

This page I created a year or so ago now and was designed originally to be an easily navigated, simple and clean website that would help drive trade to the clients email address and allow for viewing public to gauge simple information about the Food Dreckly service.

This website is also situated on a low cost web host pay plan that offers a smaller amount of bandwidth and space. With that in mind this original website was created to not push the limits of these server restraints. A small array of imagery was used and an overall low page size to decrease bandwidth usage and thus potential cost.

The biggest issue this website has was the way in which it had to be updated. Because I made this website entirely using HTML and CSS and without any hint of a real CMS, the updating of the news section and the website in general became an issue. While it was fairly simple to update the news it was a very tedious chore to keep it both updated and stylized the way they were required to be. In order to update we had to enter the new dates into a table using raw HTML and then manually alternate the colors of the different cells by hand, finally uploading the updated file via FTP. A lot to do if your not good with computers.


While it was possible for a short while to do these updates by hand it was deemed that a more client friendly approach was needed for a future release of the website.

The client had also complained about the shear bulk of spam emails that she was receiving. Despite placing various junk mail filters on the email account using programs such as 'Spam Assassin' it was made clear that a better approach was required.

Although this website did have it's faults I was a fan of it's clearly set out interface, very simple navigation system and bold layout. When viewing websites I very rarely get on with a site that over complicates itself in any form and feel that the simplest and clearest approach, with as few sprawling links and cluttered imagery, is best. In any future website design I would quite like to keep within the same theory of design.

In conclusion it's really the back end of the website that needs to be given a work over and the actual aesthetic of the website is not far wrong as it is. There needs to be improved functionality and this really will be mostly a server side job.