Michael Saganski — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:13:42 GMT

Thanks for the informative post. I learned a lot about the importance of space and hierarchy in web layout design.

Rekha Murthy — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 05:21:25 GMT

Thanks for presenting a practical approach to public health/crisis information display, which is an area of growing interest among web designers, disaster planners, governments at all levels, and the media.

We confronted a related challenge with FluPortal http://www.fluportal.org , a Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded project to provide H1N1 pandemic information to public radio and public television stations. Our target audience was not the public, rather stations’ editorial and technical staffs. We needed to present a large volume of specialized information and tools for reporters and web managers to access and deploy quickly and easily.

While design and layout were secondary to substance, they remained very important. The recurring comment from our public media users was that the site had a lot of great information, but it was too dense to sift through, especially when on deadline. While we never fully cracked the problem during the project’s short timeframe, we did make great progress in the technical tools section: http://www.fluportal.org/for-station-sites/ Here, we identified three kinds of station web managers: 1) limited technical skills and resources, 2) intermediate, and 3) advanced. We then created Quick, Easy, and Go Big guides based on each user type. Those guides were very well received.

Templates are a great idea, and there’s a similar need among public media stations who want to communicate important crisis information to their local audiences. Many of them don’t have the resources to build something from scratch each time, and templates can reduce the redundancy in effort across the public media system.

Best,
Rekha Murthy
Public Radio Exchange

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