The main purpose of The Ridge is to bring together the students of NUS. Hence, while designing the cover page of The Ridge on the web, the designer has to be particularly careful. The designer has to be able to capture the interests of surfers who go to the webpage. Take a look at the two simple cover pages which I have designed.
Welcome back! Those are simple cover pages. If I am not wrong, most people would prefer the cover page 1. It is attractive and user-friendly as compared to the boring-looking cover page 2. Cover page1 has all the links to different sections of The Ridge whereas cover page 2 has the typical "click and enter" design. When surfers arrive at cover page 1, they are able to choose sections, which they are interested in and go straight into them. Contrastingly, the cover page2 does not give the surfers any information, only giving more work to the surfers. The surfers have to click on "enter" before going straight into the content page. Such designs would deter surfers from venturing further on mainly because they do not know what is behind the cover page and they do not want to waste their time downloading the other pages, only to find that those are not the sections, which they are interested in. Most surfers just leave when they come across a similar cover page as my cover page 2.
