ATSC Website

The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), is a non-profit organization that works internationally in developing standards for digital television.

We worked with Arland Communications to figure out what sections of the site were no longer relevant, and what additional sections should be incorporated. Once we had this information, we created sitemaps to organize that information and determine the number of page templates we needed.

Organizing the content in a more visually-pleasing and user-friendly manner. The lists of standards was very basic, in that it was just a long list of links with only a title. So we added a screenshots in the preview, some textual hierarchy to the title and content, more appropriate spacing between the title, date, content etc., a brief description, and buttons for quick download/viewing of the document.

Reworking the header was our next step. The previous website had a very large logo in the header with a large graphic, and small links to their contact information and social media that were easily overlooked since the logo and graphic consumed the majority of space.We simplified the header by removing the graphic and decreasing the logo size. We added quick links to the “Contact”, “Subscribe to Newsletter” and “Become A Member” pages, since those were determined to be key business components of the website and had previously been hidden within content throughout the site.

Fourth was to make better use of the sidebar. The old site had the same items repeated in the sidebar on every page, which can cause users to become “blind” to the sidebar (with elements not changing, users may overlook that section completely). Important information in the sidebar was not accessed because it was easily overlooked. We moved one section of sidebar elements, their sponsors, to a scrolling slideshow at the bottom of the page above the footer. Showcasing the sponsors in this manner reduced the vertical space required significantly, allowing for better presentation of content within the screen real estate. Sidebar components were created to allow for easy modification by content managers on a page-by-page basis. In this manner, page specific sidebar hierarchies could be implemented. For example, the Newsletter page now has a section of cross links to quickly find archived posts from past months or years, and a button to direct users to apply for newsletter subscription. The Standards page has links to the glossaries for easy access of unfamiliar terms or acronyms used in the standards.

Last was to add and make use of a footer. There previously was not really a footer, just a couple lines of text that was repeated at the bottom of each page just below the content. But there was not enough visual separation to really call this a footer. So we added a sitemap for additional quick navigation of the site, as well as their contact information, their informational bit of text, and links to their social media.