AMO-W Program Site
A TRICARE Program Web Site
One of the contracts that I was responsible while working at IBA was the Acquisition Management Office (AMO-W). This was a critical part of TRICARE, as it handled contracts, RFPs, RFWs, and Scheduling. There was a lot of data that needed to be presented, and clear instructions on how to present it.
This site was a standard site design. It was one of the first large “corporate” sites that I've been in charge of. This is the site that I cut my Informational Architecture teeth with.
First off, this was done back in 1997. Okay, with that disclaimer out of the way, here we have the initial front page. A clear branding presence was desired, with large type to reinforce where you were at. The colors were chosen to be different than the rest of the TRICARE network. So red & black were chosen, with yellow and white as secondary choices.
The sitemap here shows the high-level structure of the site. We tried to aim for the middle ground of the "wide/shallow" and "deep/narrow" arguement. One section went past three levels, the rest were easily gotten to within the "three-click rule".
Okay, the 3D effect was done because I wanted it. But the important thing here is the subnavigation. This shows the evolution of the site, the colors have faded, and more prominence has been given to the content. We had found through emails of the users that they were spending too much time hunting for what they were looking for. Providing dynamic drop-downs via the sidebar gave us the power for the user to see into other sections without leaving their existing one.
This was a failed attempt at improving the navigation. Here we were trying it out as a topbar-style navigation, with submenus.
Current news and awards had to be prominent, and was moved to the front page. A "Very Important Message" area was created, just above the news, to really push the latest message.
This structure was gotten to through a content-analysis of the existing site, and a logical grouping based upon user tasking. (We didn't call it that back then, but that's what we ended up doing.)