Gulo Marketing Website Design Scholarship

Creating a visually pleasing website combined with the functional design creates an eye-catching rememberable website. The layout of the site must be easy to read, move across and find what you need. When people are unable to find what they need quickly, they often leave and go to the next site. Keeping people attention online is hard and best done through simple subtle design choices. Keeping to a simple grid structure that allows asymmetrical balance on the page without strong tension to keep people interested. To properly market items to people they need to be seen on the site without being too forceful and ruining the user experience. A great example of this is flycolumbus.com, home to CMH airport. Simple organization and calming blue and white colors keep people interested without overstimulation. People are able to find what they need easily and click to find out more information using a strong hierarchal structure. On the current daily flights, the organization of the information is presented without taking up the whole page, allowing the white space to guide the eye into the information. Starting on the left is the most important information and as you move through the flight you get into more details until you end with where you need to go next. The columns are clear, simple, and implied to easily differentiate the text without clouding up the page with lines. The row lines are smaller, thin, and kept in with a color change of the background. Great design doesn’t end with colors and graphs but the choice of font. Typography plays a large role in websites and without it can make the information look out of place. The font flycolumbus.com uses is ApexNew Book. Originally created by Chester Jenkins, originally designed with Rick Valicenti at Village Type design LLC for personal free usage. Sans serif allows for a casual look for basic text. There is one design choice that I do not agree with, the logos of the airlines and names are not the same font size and consistent throughout. On the positive side of the website, it does not bombard with ads or clickbait but allows for marketing to show through while clicking through the airport’s generic information. Searching for where you’ll be heading and where to stay allows people to search out the ads they place and click on them with their own free will. While the website is not extremely well done the simplicity keeps people in. The airport remains the largest passenger terminal in Central Ohio and the second busiest in the state.