What’s this Channel 4?
Featuring over 40 video interviews, games and a look back at the history of Channel 4, the site tells you who does what, how the Channel runs and their vision of the future of broadcasting.
The brief
We were commissioned to re-design an existing site for Channel 4 which was made entirely in Flash. Part of the brief was also to look at the overall architecture of the site: make it easier to find things; group the content so it was in a more logical order and create clear user-journeys across pages.
The existing website was produced completely in Flash and so was not search engine friendly. A lot had changed at the channel (E4, More 4 and 4OD had come online) since the website was released, so Channel 4 commissioned some new content from Available light to bring the story up to date. Stylistically, it was all looking a little tired too.
We were also asked to port the new site into Channel 4′s content management system so it could be updated easily.
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Design challenges
The brief specified that we had to re-use the existing flash games which had been extracted from the original site. This posed the crucial design challenge – how to marry the new site design (modern, reflecting current branding guidelines and ‘on-message’) with legacy content executed in a completely different style?
An aspect of having to use the channel’s CMS was that the templates come with a fixed-with vertical navigation area down the left-hand side. Many of the legacy flash games utilised the full width of the screen so we had to design the new site with this very much in mind. The answer to this question was to scale the flash movies down in the HTML rather than re-engineer them so that the navigation could fit too. A simple answer, but it resolved the issue. We also set the background colours of the flash games to be transparent so they would merge more sympathetically with the new design.
Other challenges lay in making the old-school site standards-compliant; we introduced a CSS-based layout (data tables were marked up properly for increased accessibility) and employed some DOM-scripting to recreate the rich functionality that was present in the flash version.
The Outcome
The new design is much more than a lick of paint. Channel 4′s brand identity is fully expressed and the uncluttured approach makes the content much more clearer.
By grouping content more logically and (crucially) renaming section titles so they are more explanatory makes content easier to find. Re-ordering navigation items to delineate the information hierarchy gives context and meaning to end-users. You can find things, you can see what there at a glance. In our opinion, the website is a much more enjoyable and rewarding experience for the viewer.
