Gene Lu

Project Details
Mobile Dev & Design is a new online-only publication featuring the latest news and information for the mobile phone industry.

Mobile Dev & Design Homepage Mockup

Strategy
Since this was a new design and not a redesign, I played around with the placement of the navigation. With a long list of categories to accommodate, I opted for a left navigation. You'll notice that on the homepage, the left nav sits about mid-screen for a monitor with a resolution of 1024x768. By giving the navigation 2nd priorty to the latest stories up top, users will be confident in getting the latest information on the mobile phone industry whenever they visit the site through the homepage.

Another case for making the navigation second is that most traffic does not, as some may think,  start at the homepage. Based off of numerous stats from other sites, a majority of site entries come through search engines and straight to the article page, which leads me to the following...

Mobile Dev & Design Article Page Mockup

You'll notice on the article page that the featured top stories disappear, allowing everything else on the site to move up including the navigation. With a saturated orange tab, visitors now have a visual starting point when skimming the page. The content is also given greater visual priority with the featured top stories out of the way allowing visitors to get to the target content.