Below is my final design concept for the home page of the forthcoming LSM Academy website:

This design now caters for, and provides a summary of, the provision we aim to offer.

One of the key changes from earlier designs is in semantics; the section ‘courses’ has been changed to ‘activities’. The reason being that the Academy wants to offer more than just educational workshops so ‘activities’ better describes the breadth of provision.

To see the full provision head to: http://www.behance.net/wip/193743/

Banner Images

To enliven the home page a little, a slideshow of banner images describing the provision (and providing screen real estate for any special announcements) have been designed. You can see the first example in the design above but here are the other 3:

Sticking with the simple, flat design style of the original and the rest of the website, these banners will scroll (or fade) to provide context to the various sections of the website provision.

Calendar Popup

The blue dots on the calendar indicate something is happening. It might be obvious from the other content on the page but as it is intended for a user to scroll through the months in advance, there may be activities that have not yet made it to the ‘future activities’ section of the font page.

Therefore some indication of what activity was happening on that day was required:

This will activate on mouse over and hide when the mouse leaves the area. This might need some user testing because that circle is quite small. Fortunately, there is quite a bit of padding around each date so an invisible area occupying as much space as possible (before overlap) could be implemented.

Moving on…

The next task in this concept development project is to take a selection of ‘sections’ to demonstrate how the rest of the website will look.

I have chosen an ‘activity’, specifically a ‘technical workshop’ because I have real content for it. Expect to see a post with a design soon.