In March of 2007, I worked as a Contractor for Zoofer.com, a social networking site, to redesign their look and fee and add some much needed navigation that was missing from their current website. The owners of the site were not happy with the current site's design and the site had no real navigation and had some major bugs that were crashing the pages with errors, making the site less than user friendly. I created several prototypes that included drop down menus for navigation, a side bar navigation menu and blogo branding for each of the sections of the site.The site was divided into sections including 'Relationships, Lifestyles, Health and Money'. The current owners of Zoofer wanted to have a seperate point of entry for each section as well as one central point of entry to the site. The screen captures below are images of some of the prototypes that I designed based upon the requrements that the owners gave me. I created these mockups using Visual Studio 2005 for the menu navigation, then screen captured them using Paint Shop Pro.
I designed this page with a more vivid color scheme, matching up the menu colors, drop down menus and images that were easily changed and customizable since we were looking at creating the site with Cascading Style Sheets, include files and XML where the look and feel and navigation could be quickly changed for things like menu background colors, mouse rollovers and highlighted sections. I liked this design because it had a very professional look to it and included navigation that the current site did not have to add to the user experience and find information without forcing the user to have to dig around the site looking for information.
