After a year of posting articles, we felt that the FIVEFOOTWAY needed a refresher. We wanted to lay the foundations for future growth and also to respond to the lessons that we’ve learned from talking to our readers. And so, calling on our experience of operating over the past year (and also experiences of others), we worked towards creating Version 2.0 of the website.

We started thinking about the re-design at a conceptual level to understand the goals of the version. The first step was to flesh out the fundamental goals of the website and then striving to achieve it. We then made the decision to work with another designer to bring a fresh pair of eyes to oversee the refining process and that’s where Octopus Ink came in. Working closely, we explored and identified the key ideas that needed to be captured within V2.0.

The Redesign Concept

At its very core, Version 2.0 is about removing informational and visual clutter from the website. While some extra snippets of information are useful for a website user, some of it merely serves to distract. Considering that our main readers are highly educated professionals and professionals-to-be who are very pressed for time, we feel that the removal of visual clutter was fundamental to making FIVEFOOTWAY.com truly useful. By examining the value of these information and also its positioning in a webpage, we worked towards making every bit of information on the website truly usable.

We decided that while there was a need to freshen things up, certain key elements of the website should be retained and refined to strengthen its identity. This thinking was applied to our logo redesign and also in the selection of the colour palette. We also decided to tweak the website layout structure rather than introducing a completely new layout so as to develop a sense of continuity and familiarity.

Home Page: Information at a glance

The most obvious change to a visitor would be the home page of FIVEFOOTWAY.com.  We maintained the slideshow as the visual anchor of the page and arranged other information around it.  As compared to the previous version that required much scrolling, we have attempted to display the information in a more compact manner without compromising on clarity.

On top of that, we’ve introduced the calendar on the front page where a simple mouse over brings up a box to show the events happening on that day. We also introduced a subtle touch to the front page for a better experience by having a grey background upon having the mouse over the article title. Ultimately, we hope that the front page will be more useful for a visitor.

The Articles

For each of our articles, we’ve introduced a 2-column layout; the right being the supporting information and the left, the main article. The right-column now shows the title, the article credits and a new addition: the summary. This 20-word summary serves as a preface for the full article and we believe that this will be a useful feature for one of those random-surfing days.

So what happens when you reach the end of the article? After much thought, we concluded that you might be inclined to do something as a reaction to the article. With that, we present to you the Tool box, the Related Posts and also the Comment Box. These ‘call to action’ serves to use the article that have just been read as the point of departure for further action related to the topic and this is in line with what we want to achieve at FIVEFOOTWAY.com- to encourage discussion and action.

Menu Hierarchy

We also realised that there are a lot of things that we want to share with our readers but the problem was about ordering it in a manner that was easy to find. So now, there are 2 bands of menu, one at the top and the other at the bottom.

The top menu is directly related to the articles and features of the site; Feature, Report, Review and Broadcast. The one at the bottom leads to supporting information that we feel you might want to know. We highly recommend reading our “Philosophy” page to get a glimpse into the FIVEFOOTWAY soul.

And more!

There are also other technical improvements that we’ve done under the hood for example; upgrading the Wordpress engine, cleaning up our CSS so that it loads faster, installing plug-ins for added capabilities, moving to a Singapore based server for faster loading time and installing a new newsletter subscription engine amongst others. We are also working on refining our tagging system so that “Related Posts” will show more relevant content for you.

There will be more visual and technical tweaks that will be done in the coming month as we iron out the bugs and make changes with feedback from you. We want to make the FIVEFOOTWAY experience a plesant one. Do leave a comment on this post or drop us an email at office[at]fivefootway.com to tell us how we are doing and what needs changes.

One more thing…

Fresh from working hard on getting FIVEFOOTWAY.com refreshed, we are now working on getting a new section on the website up by late 2008/early 2009. We present to you, The “FIVEFOOTWAY shop”, an online concept store where one can find products and publications (among other things) to feed the architectural mind,soul and life. We think that it is time for a carefully curated concept store by architects for architects. More details will be made available in the coming months. Meanwhile, hope you keep walking on the FIVEFOOTWAY!

Articles >> Features

FIVEFOOTWAY V2.0