VIA Interaction

Friday, August 10, 2007

The Web Designer's Dilemma: Design for visual impact or for easy maintenance?

Analog Devices launched a new page featuring its products for the automotive industry, which we were privileged to help them with.

The goal was to create something that conveyed to the big players in the automotive world that Analog Devices is serious about their industry and has invested a lot in it. ADI has a ton of content (because they have been serious about automotive and they do have a ton of experience with it) and a vision for how they wanted it presented.

Web designers can do wonderful things, particularly with Flash, but the Web team had some practical considerations: The site had to fit into the current directory structure, and the team wanted to be able to change, add or delete content as needed.

Content Management Systems loom large is all these kinds of discussions. They are getting better, but it is still fairly easy to recognize Web sites that use content management systems. They are characterized by stacked rectangles, a design that more easily adapts to the ever-changing volume of content that is "poured" into design templates used for multiple pages. We knew we wanted to use Adobe's Flash to add some sizzle to this page, and that is even tougher for Content Management Systems to handle.

With the large amount of content that we had but the inability to insert another level of index pages -- that's where the technical requirement about the current directory structure came into play -- we found ourselves in a bind.

Our solution: Build a Web page that included both Flash and HTML, or, more specifically, DHTML. Doing so enabled us to provide different levels or layers of content on a single page in ways that we believe are easy for visitors to comprehend.

The Flash section at the top of the page enables you to look at an exterior and interior view of the automobile in order to find the application you are interested in.

The DHTML in each of the columns below expands to reveal more choices than could be comfortably displayed on a single page.

The fact that the lower half of the page uses HTML and DHTML means that it is relatively easy for ADI's staff HTML experts to add or change content.

The result is a meticulously-designed Web page that isn't frozen in time.

posted by Tim Beidel at 8/10/2007 03:06:00 PM

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