Phil Oye

About the project

QVC is a home shopping television network, selling everything from jewelry to electronics. Their Web site had been around a while, but the design had started to decay, it was time for a refresh. The goal of this revision was to improve the navigation and clean up the graphic design.

My role on the project

This was my first project at Studio Archetype. I acted as the information architect and worked closely with the graphic designer.

The solution

The scope of the redesign was limited to changing the homepage and frames for the global navigation. We could not affect the organization of the information or the nomenclature.

This project showed me the one advantage of using frames in HTML—I'm still looking for a second. The previous version of the site used frames for the global navigation, so we were able to touch only five or six files and voilà, we had a site that looked completely different. Of course, there are many other ways to achieve the same effect, but frames are what we had, and we took advantage.

This project was about cleanup, the global navigation was a mess. There were two rows of tabs, which unsuccessfully attempted to distinguish between main sections and utilities. Our approach was to make the main sections a little more prominent, separate the utilities, and to highlight the rotating content.

Unfortunately, our redesigned version has once again started to decay. Only bits of our design still can be seen, how depressing.