Contracted by the crew at Weatherzone, I put together the css/xhtml for the weather section of smh.com.au

It was a small project that required some creative css to maintain the integrity of the designers vision while balancing the accessibility of the pages.

View site » 

Weatherzone is recognized as Australia’s leading commercial weather information provider to media and internet organisations serving customers in industry, agriculture, government, recreation, education and consumer markets.

Experiencing a dramatic increase in the amount of incoming traffic, Weatherzone had outgrown its original incarnation (see below).

Requirements gathering

With a team of in-house designers and developers, Conversant Studios was contracted to re-organise the organic structure of the existing site. Blessed with some truly magnificent content, Weatherzone had an army of loyal customers that had learned to use the site in its existing form… they were familiar and comfortable with the structure and had invested a significant amount of time coming to terms with this structure.

But the majority of users visited only one or two screens and did not invest the time and effort to dive deeper into the impressive content within the site.

Personas

After gathering as much raw data about the site as possible (including some customer surveys) we put together some personas and came up with four key customers.

Personas are representative archetypes of the key market segments. They are a synthesis of the core users of the site and the new segments the redeveloped site is targeting.

Information architecture

Once the personas had been defined and the key targets were defined, the information architecture (the blueprint) for the site took shape over several iterations.

View site »
*note – the design and development was completed in-house by Weatherzone