When I first joined the company in May last year our website was in urgent need of some attention. To say it was not fulfilling its potential was a bit of an understatement as i think you will agree from the attractive screen shot I have attached below.

We then launched our new site in August 2008 which improved search functionality and presented a selection of posters and links that the user could browse, it also allowed the company to start marketing the services page with the big tasty yellow button in the middle of the display. There are still a range of functionality issues, most importantly the trailer poster display randomly rather than from a specific feed and this meeans the user is presented with a range of movies that could be current, or as is usually the case, completely out of date – doh!

We have been busy… Listening to user requests and looking at other sites around the internet has made us realise that our nice little business card site could be so much more. So we have been put together some ideas and come up with a some designs that take advantage of great ideas we have been receiving. Our approach has been very much based on looking at our user requirements and I have added the results of our thinking.  Perhaps the steps we have taken will be useful to you if you are undergoing or approaching your own website redesign.

Distributors: reach, easy access to the specific film trailers and statistics, professional lay out

Media Partners: easy access to our product pages that channel different types of media partner towards the correct solution while clearly explaining how to implement our different services

End Users: easy to find on google, stickier content important information to do with the film, ability to share our content easily.

Design Process

From the excercise of brainstorming user requirements the designer was given the following brief.

End Users

• Frontpage of filmtrailer.com provides a much wider range of film poster to choose from like www.apple.com/trailers separated into now in cinemas and coming soon.
• Inclusion of relevant trailer images in the info section
• Embed to be included in the info section and
• Clear separation of Film trailers for theatrical release and Film trailers for DVD
• For theatrical release the ability to see cinema info and buy a ticket (we want to develop a more intuitive interface that screenrush.com) The documentation for ideas on how htis would be developed is available as an attachment at the end of this posting.
• For DVD release the ability to buy or rent the film (ok we are still dreaming about this one)
• For theatrical the ability to buy the movie ticket and see the film times (ok we are still dreaming about this one)

Media Partner

• Clearer access to the yellow (horrible and want to change this) button that takes them through to the ugly services site
• Greater integration of the services page www.services.filmtrailer.com and www.filmtrailer.com
• Improvement on the interface for users to become more like www.brightcove.com interface

Distributors

• Distributors login access to a myfilmtrailer.com section of the site. My filmtrailer.com is pending design.

For a sneak peak of where we are now click here. Or check out the snap shots below.