If Looks Could Kill - Creating an Attractive Website

Step one to re-creating Lighthouse Kids’ website was considering the look. We’ve all seen sites that are too cluttered, or too cheesy, with pictures that either did not aptly represent the content or that were low quality. We hear the adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” all the time, but like monkeys attracted to a shiny stone, we go for the eye-catching cover more often than not. Looks matter.

Before

As we discussed during our last class together, the desire for information is what drives a user to a website, but the packaging of that content can make or break the site.

After

The Lighthouse Kids board wanted to have a clean look that was as easy on the eye as it was to navigate. They also wanted to get rid of an illustrated lighthouse logo as their standing page banner and add a real picture of the White Island Lighthouse.  They agreed with our class’s assessment that the automatic audio opening should be eliminated.

I rifled through my photos from past trips to the island, found some artwork, made a new banner incorporating their slogan, “Do What’s Right, Save the Light,” and went to work, using Weebly for the first time.

Weebly is user-friendly, provides a variety of themes and has recently added lots more fonts to choose from. I went with Arial to keep a crisp look and made sure to incorporate lots of white space.  As a former editor I was dismayed by the amount of spelling and grammatical errors on the current Lighthouse Kids site (For example, it’s a “vicious” storm, not a "viscous" one.) and went to work proofing the copy.  They were paying $250 a year, plus other fees, to a company to create and maintain their site and there were sentences without periods on the end. Looks are important, but so is good grammar – especially when your organization is asking people for money.