A lot changes in 10 years. For a web sites it is the amount of data you can now send to the reader – remember those squawky modems? Can you imagine the time it took to send through a photo that filled your screen? Nope, because you had to give up after half an hour of waiting. How about the resolution of your screen (how much you could fit in it), let alone that tablets didn’t really exist in any numbers and don’t even talk about standard cell phones showing pages.
Māori Sports Awards haven’t updated their web site for over that long and were long past the need to update.
OLD SITE (small on screen, few images, lots and lots of menus grown over the years)
NEW SITE
The biggest change is responsive websites – to be able to automatically resize depending on screen or device, to be able to work with desktops, tablets (both landscape and portrait) and be able to resize to mobile phone screens for easy reading and navigation. When this web site first went live the average screen resolution was 800×600 pixels, it’s now 1366×768, followed by 1920×1080. BUT it still has to be readable on smaller screens, it has to work with tablets that change orientation AND most important of all it now has to play nicely with your phone’s display.
We have now moved away from static pages, like a printed brochure. Data is king, we need to be able to reshuffle both the order and the content, to present it in just the right way for each individuals need.
SEO (search engine optimisation) – the ability to have your content correctly found quickly on search sites like Google. Basically web marketing. If you cannot be easily found then people will not even look at the great stuff on your site.
How about some social network integration? We need to able to easily show our friends and colleagues interesting pages through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn.
Web sites are growing, it’s harder and harder to run a large site by yourself, time to share the load with easily with your team. You need integrated tools to share the load, statistics that mean something, flexibility to change on the fly without having to redesign the complete site.
The most important aspect in this update was bringing across the mass of historical information (lists, photos, videos, etc) and presenting it in a way that is easy to view.
