UK Skills, part of the UK government's Skills Funding Agency, is set up to champion high standards of training and development by running awards and competitions. In 2007 I won the job to redesign their main website in a competitive pitch with their existing tech development agency when they decided to re-tender the contract.
The client had a small budget and needed a simple to manage site for their small communications team, most of the content was text-heavy with occasional amateur photography, so a clean, grid and type based approach seemed appropriate. UK Skills preferred the various competitions they run to take centre stage (each had it's own sub-site) so opted for a minimal design.
The little professional photography they did have available was used to focus attention instead on the competitors who take part in their activities. A scrolling strip of competitors from previous competitions animates slowly across the top of each page, clicking on one took the user to a case study for the individual in the photo. A toggle button allowed the animation bar to be hidden if preferred, leaving just the blue navigation bar.
The client had a small budget and needed a simple to manage site for their small communications team, most of the content was text-heavy with occasional amateur photography, so a clean, grid and type based approach seemed appropriate. UK Skills preferred the various competitions they run to take centre stage (each had it's own sub-site) so opted for a minimal design.
The little professional photography they did have available was used to focus attention instead on the competitors who take part in their activities. A scrolling strip of competitors from previous competitions animates slowly across the top of each page, clicking on one took the user to a case study for the individual in the photo. A toggle button allowed the animation bar to be hidden if preferred, leaving just the blue navigation bar.
Homepage
News index
News article
Photo gallery entry
Case study index
Case Study
About UK Skills
Management Team
Sub-site Branding
UK Skills had several separate sites for their various initiatives but no sense of them all belonging to the same organisation. Navigation between sub-sites was also cumbersome and confusing. To address this an unobtrusive bar was added to the top of each site with an attribution to UK Skills - on rollover this revealed itself to be global navigation, allowing visitors to browse across the various sites whilst also introducing consistent branding. Dynamic sub-navigation provided deep-links, to avoid jumping back and forth between the main site. Various states of interaction are shown below…
The default attribution bar
On-rollover displays global navigation for the UK Skills main site.
The 'Projects' sub-nav provides access directly to other UK Skills initiatives.
And the News sub-nav lists the most recent entries.
Design variation
An alternate concept variation. This was used as the template for the later WorldSkills projects.
