Ricki Larkin

My Design Collection website design can be found at http://rickilarkin.co.uk/theDesignCollection

The Research section is written below and the Practical Understanding can be found on youtube.co.uk at the link supplied at the bottom of the page. Please e-mail any comments to ku.ca.sffats.tneduts|045904sl#ku.ca.sffats.tneduts|045904sl.

RESEARCH

Lacma

Online Titanic Museum Review (Available at: http://www.onlinetitanicmuseum.com)

The Online Titanic Museum website does succeed in following best practise; the website is coded well and put together using CSS which can be disabled to enable easy reading for screen readers. Also the standard layout works well with the width of the page meeting the minimum 800 pixel width. The fonts are easy to read and the colours work well to, again, allow easy reading. The images, found by clicking on one of the menu links, have a good layout and the user can quickly and easily see what each image is before selecting them for a larger view. All of these images have a short title underneath to again aid the user in explaining what each thumbnail contains. After clicking the thumbnail in the gallery the image is shown on a larger scale with a description down the left hand side of the page.

One of the main areas where they have not followed best practise is when naming the links for each image. For example on the ‘Exhibit #1 – The Unsinkable Titanic’ page (http://www.onlinetitanicmuseum.com/unsinkable1.html) the first three images all have the description of ‘Harland & Wolff’, this would cause confusion to somebody viewing the page using a screen reader. Again on the ‘Exhibit #2 – Disaster Strikes’ page (http://www.onlinetitanicmuseum.com/memorial1.html), there are three images with the description ‘Sheet Music’. These descriptions should not be duplicated, especially as they are so close together, avoiding this duplication and being clearer on the descriptions would cause a lot less confusion for user experiencing the website using a screen reader.

I believe that the Online Titanic Museum have completely forgotten about best practise in the ‘Store’ (http://www.onlinetitanicmuseum.com/shop.html). Other than the menu links, there is no accessibility methods implemented. When CSS is disabled, the page is extremely difficult to view. The Online Titanic Museum has followed best practise on the majority of its pages but seems to have completely forgotten about them on the ‘Store’ page.

titanic_12.jpg

Review of Design Collection content

After visiting the Design Collection and viewing what items are stored there, it became apparent that the majority of the items were clothes or accessories, like shoes, hats, etc. As I was taking photographs of the items that interested me personally, like the old computers and electrical equipment, I spoke to Ruth Allen about what she thought the most influential items of the collection were. Ruth explained that the gold stilettos were often used and were often associated as the Design Collections main piece. These stilettos were also an interesting design with a large spiral ankle part and a shiny gold colour, both of these features could work well in a web design template with the stiletto as the main header image.

gold_shoes_01.jpg

Rough sketch on displaying images

As you can see by the image below, the images found from a search function, or by clicking on a gallery link, could be displayed in a grid or table format as thumbnails. Clicking these thumbnails would bring up the larger image in either a popup window or a new page which would provide space for an image description including history.

layout01.jpg

PRACTICAL UNDERSTANDING

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sMdfuh-ruI

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