In the past few years the profile of digital or electronic media e.g. cd ROM, the internet, and electronic publishing in general, has grown immensely. The internet is a relatively new medium which represents a revolution in communications technology comparable perhaps to the invention of the telephone. For many millions of people around the world it is now a primary means of communication.

We are now beginning to realise that pages on 'the net', like the pages of a traditional publication, need to be well designed to attract, stimulate and sustain the interest of the end user. According to Neville Brody, one of the UKs most influential designers of the past 15 years, currently 90% of what we see on the Internet is badly designed.

The Amanfoo Web Site

February 1999 saw the launch of the latest look of the Prempeh Website. In creating the new look site we have had to take account of a diverse range of criteria not only in an aesthetic terms but also with a wary eye on the technical limitations of the medium when targeting the widest possible audience.

For our purposes the college website must project a confident, consistent, upmarket, approachable, dependable face - and yet must be seen to be contemporary, upbeat, not stuffy. It must also be efficient and easy to use and meet the high technical specifications demanded of contemporary websites .

Target Audience

One of the primary considerations when approaching any design project is identification of the target audience. In the case of designing websites this principle takes on greater precedence due to the divergent nature of the hardware and software used by various user groups. For example, if I put up a gallery site showing full colour artwork using scanned images which are made up of thousands or millions of colours I immediately lose a significant percentage of my potential audience. The reason for this is that the greater majority of people using the internet have monitors which work on a palette of 256 colours and which are often configured unwittingly to a 16 colour palette. In this instance images which look beautiful on my monitor will be downloaded and converted or dithered to a lesser palette and the results can end up as variable, to say the least. We also need to recognize that full colour images tend to have large file sizes which may take too long to download.

The variety of browsers in use around the world and the variability of browser settings presents a similar problem. A browser on a replacement colour setting will convert the image to its own palette, again producing unpredictable results. This however does not present a problem if I have identified my audience as high specification workstation users with the latest version of Netscape.

We, as a highly pretigious institution in a very competitive marketplace, need however to reach a much wider audience; an audience which includes schools, prospective pupils, parents and guardians of future Amanfoo, students, postgraduate students, overseas students, researchers, business users, staff etc. - all of whom use different hardware and software.

To combat the above problems we developed a custom palette which allows us to dither all of our templates or gif files whilst retaining optimum picture quality. All of the images converted to the new palette have been tested across various monitors and browser settings to ensure that we sustain a consistent level of quality across the board.

Establishing the Identity

Developing, or more particularly, establishing a corporate identity over a site as large as the Prempeh College's presents very immediate logistical and administrative problems.

It is important that the Amanfoo website maintains a consistent visual identity across as many pages as possible.

To this end we have broken our design down to a series of templates which, when used in part or as a whole, will engender a cohesive, consistent, functional identity which meets the aforementioned aesthetic and technical criteria.

The Home Page

The Home Page must project a confident, up-market, approachable, dependable face - and yet must be seen to be contemporary, upbeat, not stuffy. It establishes the visual language which permeates the whole of the site and is the keystone of the website identity.

The most prominent feature of the Home Page is the Great Stool in the centre of the page. To communicate something of the life and spirit of the CULTURE-RICH ROYAL SCHOOL, we have created a montage of students from a diverse range of disciplines clearly enjoying life on campus. On the far upper right corner is His Majesty Osei Agyemang Prempeh II, the Otumfuo whose vision in 1940 led to the establishment of the Asante State's First Boys Institution, looking resplendent in his Royal Kente. Moving clockwise, Sims Street is below, leading from the school gate to the Administration block. Below the eye-catching school bus is The Appean Way, the Spirit of the School!. On the left of the bus is Serwah House, "The Gateway to China." Above the Mighty Boneshaker (The School Truck) is Ramseyer House, followed by the Greatest Cadet Corps in the Land, and The School Choir. The Main Classroom Block is shown on the top, followed by The Nation's first Computer Center. In the center of it all is the Osae Assembly Hall, where we spent most of our time!

This combination maintains the link to the School colours whilst allowing us to balance the contrast to highlight the college shield and website logo.

The network layer has a reduced percentage opacity to blend unobtrusively with the photomontage background.

The Background

A good screen background should function as a non-obtrusive, balanced, low contrast ground upon which any overlaid information, whether visual or typographical, can be easily read. Although the background should be non-distracting, it can be used to subliminally evoke an emotional response in the end-user. In this instance we have simulated a high quality laid paper, something which might be used for corporate stationery at the upper end of the market e.g. financial institutions, architectural practices, publishers etc. This is intended to project a corporate, upmarket, dependable face whilst maintaining good readability in textual information and in graphic illustrations. An added property of this textured paper background is that it can be used at a small scale to create a seamless tile to compose the larger background. This helps to keep file sizes down which in turn improves performance in terms of download times. The colour of the background in the early stages of the design was white. The white ground however broke up badly on certain browser settings due to the limitations of greyscales in web palettes. We found that adding a touch of colour improved this and following testing and feedback from users found that a cream coloured paper maintains readability and brings warmth to the page designs.

The Shield

We already have a long standing identity in the shape of the College shield or crest, and we felt it important to retain this as the foundation from which to develop the new look site.

To place the shield in a more contemporary context we recreated the stool as a 3D model. The colours of the crest are used throughout the page designs to re-enforce the College's corporate identity and our prestigious heritage, as well as reasserting the College's identity throughout the site. The appearance of our stool and crest on every page brings an added visual dimension to the site which is not merely cosmetic.

Secondary Level Pages

On the secondary level and the design changes to a simpler form which still adheres to, and works well within the overall philosophy of the design concept.

We still retain the same compositional grid and the shield, the stool and headings remain.

There is a table with a white background to match black text colours. This way visitors in a rush can print out information and read it on their way to Rivoli Cinema. This also improves our performance in terms of download times.

Conclusion

Neville Brody may be correct in his observation regarding the quality of design on the World Wide Web. It is true that the vast majority of people creating websites around the world may not have the aesthetic sensibilities of a trained designer and there are certainly some humdinger sites out there, but it is equally true that web technology as it exists puts constraints upon web designers.

Software developers would have us believe that website design is as easy as falling off a log but the development of efficient, usable, appealing websites clearly takes time, effort and skill and an ability to harness the ever changing technologies of electronic communication. It may be some time before the web is the all-singing, all-dancing multimedia communications behemoth which pundits are predicting, but there is certainly no question of its growing importance as a global communications medium.

We have in the course of developing the new look site made many compromises ourselves, all of which were brought about by the limitations of the current technology. We have however designed a look which we feel can give the Royal School a contemporary, qualitative, efficient, coherent presence on the World Wide Web.

We cannot hope to please everyone within an establishment of this size but we hope that those of you who are taking up the challenge of creating new sites or revamping old ones will enjoy working within the Amanfoo Website Corporate Identity.