Friday, March 14, 2008

Tyndale House: Website Design Competition

Tyndale House in Cambridge (where many of the finest evangelical scholars in the world travel to do their research and writing) is asking for help in redesigning their webpage. Here's David Instone Brewer:
You are probably familiar with Tyndale's webpages. Informative but not inspiring.

At least, that's what I'm told. I'm not good at this visual stuff. So I need your help.

If you produce an inspired design, you could be on every page ("page design by....).

It might be the start of a new career!

Simply copy the page at http://www.tyndalehouse.co.uk/library.htm and redesign it.

So get out your Photoshop or whatever program makes you feel the most creative,
or even Word or Publisher if you wish, and send me a mock up of the web page.

You don't need to produce any code or stylesheets or working menus. I'll do that.

Your contribution is the design - the colors, layout, font, graphics, menu position etc
Please include colours for Hover over and Visited links (if these are different).

Send your entry to me, attached to a reply email. Closing date: May 1st.
The best will go on show and the winner will be famous.

I will be one of the judges, so let me tell you what I like and don't like:

I like usability
e.g. having a full menu always available so you can go anywhere from anywhere
(many websites send you to the home page or obscure part of the page to find the full menu)

I like clarity
e.g. using a plain background which doesn't interfere with reading the text, and using fonts which can be rescaled by the user (using the menu View: Text size)
(many sites use CSS with fixed font sizes so you have to zoom the whole page)

I like easily updated pages
Personally, I hand-craft html, php & MySQL, but most people prefer WYSIWYG.
Unfortunately CMS (Content Management Systems) are often too limiting, so if you propose one, make sure it is very flexible - ie you can add code easily and put anything anywhere. GooglePages are a good compromise, so I integrate these into the site for pages which other people need to update - e.g. staff pages. See mine at http://www.tyndaleHouse.com/Staff/Instone-Brewer/
So the design has to allow for this kind of integration of pages within a frame.

Actually, most of this doesn't apply to your design. I'm just getting it off my chest.
So let your imagination go! And show me what you've come up with.
Don't worry about the technical side of things. If it looks good, we can probably find a way to make it work. Attach it to an email to me.
I hope so will take the up the challenge. (For more info on their important work, see the interview I did last year with Peter Williams. For those who want to consider supporting this ministry financially, see here.)