The award-winning
site provides daily architectural news updates, events listings,
and details of architectural competitions. Free email newsletters
for the news items and the competitions reach 2,000 and 20,000 subscribers
worldwide respectively. Archeire also contains much historical data,
as well as details on contemporary projects. Sections deal with
some of the outstanding figures of 20th-century Irish architecture
- Kevin Roche, Eileen Grey and Michael Scott.
With its thriving
discussion forums, Archeire is the place on the Internet for those
with a query on Irish architecture, and we receive requests daily
via email for further information or contact details on Irish practices
and buildings.
We have also
forged links with other architectural websites throughout the world
by setting up the International Competitions Network to share details
of architectural competitions throughout the Internet. This has
resulted in Irish architectural competitions getting far more publicity
worldwide, as the network has over 30 members (one per member country)
including large websites in the USA, the UK, Australia and most
European countries.
Archeire has
won many awards for its content and community, including two Golden
Spiders (the Oscars of the Irish Internet world): one in 1997 for
Best Non-Commercial site; and one in 2000 for Best Online Community
/ Special Interest. It has also been a runner up in 1998. In addition
to the two Golden Spiders, Archeire has been singled out by many
newspapers and journals including Architectural Review, AJ,
the Irish Times, the BBC, the New York Times, the
Guardian, and Yahoo.com as a Site of the Week. Just late
last year it was a runner-up in two categories in the European Content
Awards
Over the years,
we have made subtle changes to Archeire's design, as baseline technology
and bandwidth have improved (browser standards and versions, and
modem speeds). Each incarnation has happened for specific reasons
- usually to allow expansion and addition of new areas, rather than
for more general aesthetic reasons.
Version
1, 28 February1997-January 1998
Although parts
of Archeire had been online from mid 1996, it wasn't until early
1997 that a domain name and ultimately the name Archeire was settled
on. The site's original version was quite simplistic, but set the
colour palette that remains in use to this day. The subtle and subdued
colour scheme allows the illustrations of the buildings to take
centre stage. Unlike future versions, the homepage of Archeire Mark
1 incorporated animated gif images that were the 'in thing' at the
time. Future versions went for a more restrained or purer look,
ignoring any trendy or transient technologies. In the early days,
we gave each section its own distinct look and feel. There was no
real central navigation system, as the site had only five clearly
distinct areas and the main emphasis at this time was keeping pages
to an absolute minimum, so text links were used instead of graphical
buttons.
The Architectural
Dublin section had a bolder and more elaborate 'look and feel'.
Using a brighter colour palette and built to the very narrow width
of 460 pixels, it was later widened to 600 pixels but remained essentially
the same, while the remainder of the site underwent several revisions
over the next two years.
Version
2, January 1998-May 1998
This incorporated
new graphical elements in the form of headers and banners, but still
retained its predecessor's very white minimalist look. Long front
pages have always been a feature of Archeire due to the sheer amount
of content within the site (3,500 pages at the last count), but
this version proved very unsuccessful in its ability to push new
content to the reader's attention. The front page was too long,
with many static elements, and newer information tended to be buried.
Version 3,
May 1998-January 1999
Not really a
full redesign but a correction of some faults in the previous version.
A common navigation was added to 'top and tail' the page design:
the blue bar containing the primary sections, with the grey bar
containing the secondary areas.
|
|
|
top:
Archeire, Version 2; screengrab; courtesy the author;
middle: Archeire,
Version 3; screengrab; courtesy the author
bottom: Archeire,
Version 4; screengrab; courtesy the author
|
Version
4, January 1999-January 2000
Designed and
built over the holiday season as a means of killing time, this version
moved away from previous ones that centred the main text area on
the page. Now it became aligned along the screen's left-hand side.
We moved what we thought of as the site's main sections to a common
navigation bar along the top of each page, with the secondary elements
down the left.
For the first
time we produced graphical elements for items featured on the homepage,
and dynamically updated items to create a constantly changing page
including latest threads from the discussion forums and the competitions
database. This meant that frequent visitors to the site saw regular
new features and news added to the homepage.
|
|
|
Archeire,
Version 5; screengrab (three images); courtesy the author
|
Version
5, January 2000-May 2001
The top navigation
on the previous level was unexpandable for new areas. It was also
less than obvious for new visitors. The pages were aligned to the
centre of the screen again and the major areas of the site placed
in the left-hand blue bar. We decided to add pictorial elements
for each area of the site in the top left-hand corner, featuring
details from buildings around Ireland, all of which link to further
information on the building depicted. The page illustrated contains
detail from the Bank of Ireland in College Green, Dublin.
While designing
this version, several variants on a theme were examined, to leave
the site with a central navigation system that could be easily extended
without major reconstruction.
The initial
idea was to maintain the by now very large navigation over three
horizontal lines, with the main backup areas along the top of the
page. After discarding that idea as too unwieldy, various elements
from the concept were carried over to a second variant, and a standard
arrangement of navigational elements down the side was adopted.
This evolved slightly with the addition of curved elements and a
darker blue.
|
|
|
Archeire,
Version 6; screengrab (two images);courtesy the author
|
Version
6, current version, May 2001 to date
The biggest
difference in the site's most recent version is the widening of
the page to 800 pixels. Depicting architecture through a visual
medium rather than the written word does require larger photographs
than most other forms of content. Using the corner-image format
of the previous version, we dispensed with the wide blue vertical
bar containing the navigation, and opted for a series of colour-coded
buttons: dark blue for organisations hosted by the site; mid-blue/grey
for opinion pieces; and grey for historical and feature areas. The
navigation was shortened by amalgamating several areas into one
section to tidy up a messy structure that arose due to continuous
expansion over the years. The homepage, like its immediate predecessor,
is dynamically generated as new content is added into news and competitions
sections and forums.
In theory there
may be a temptation to make radical changes in a website's design
each time, but in practice you are also confined by navigational
questions, the demands of structuring a large and growing amount
of content so that it is easily accessible and understandable, and
the need to avoid alienating regular visitors who already highly
familiar with the site's look and feel.
Personally
I feel that this design evolution path is nearing its end, but an
end that I'm very happy with, as the current design copes equally
well with illustrations and large bodies of text. Also the site
has now become so large that changing the appearance of it is a
major project and the energy to change it just isn't there. Maybe
next year...
Paul
Clerkin
is
a founding partner of des-ire publishing.
