In 2013, I was commissioned by the Institute of Palestine Studies (IPS) to redesign their website. Being an institute that has been conducting documentation, research, analysis, and publication on Palestinian affairs and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1963, they have a dense, diverse and rich amount of content. As with all academic and scholarly institutes, content needs to be presented in a very clear, organized and consistent manner so that interest can be captured and information can be fished out easily. Their existent website at the time was not very user-friendly in these respects.
I sat down with IPS to first work on restructuring the site so that it could become more straightforward and intuitive. Once the new structure was set in place, the rest became a matter of layout, typography and user interface. After the English website was done, I worked on the Arabic adaptation. Below are the designs that were approved by the client.
On the homepage, the left-hand side section is a reiteration of the mid-level menu, however it brings out more information about each section in the website and even highlights specific issues/books/topics to invite the user to click. The middle section is also used to draw importance towards a particular issue or hot topics. In the sidebar on the right are specific calls to action and a newsfeed.
Upon hovering over each section in the mid-level menu, a sub-section menu appears. When the section is clicked, the sub-section menu remains fixed.
"Archiving" or "filing" content was one of the key aims of the website, without rendering browsing or scrolling cumbersome and while keeping some information exposed on the outer levels. For example, the forward and back arrows under each JPS volume allow the user to see what the feature article in each issue of the volume was. Go To Top buttons were punctuated at every 6 volumes to return to the mid-level menus. Of course, users could directly jump to the volume if they seek a particular volume or year.
On pages that are not so rigorous with information, I tried to make the typography slightly more playful without compromising the overall serious tone of the website.
The archiving of JQ is different to JPS in that it stores the issues under the year and not the volume. Still, the design could adapt nicely to both sections.
One of the "lighter" sections of the website, the bookstore section was done in a dynamic way as though one were visiting a physical book store. The featured books are brought to the front and it is easy to shop according to one's preference of chronological order, language or category.
As with e-commerce sites that sell books, information is provided clearly while an attempt to upsell is also made.
As the activities and functions of the IPS are many, the News & Updates section has been done in a way such that one can keep up with it all, whether through the calendar or the newsletter.
