MEWAN

MEWAN was created in 2004 and was the internet start page of every single primary school (bar two) in Manchester.

It’s slogan was:

the fast route to the websites that teachers have found most useful

and that’s what it is - a bunch of extremely relevant links bunched in one place (in a neatly styled package) so teachers can find what they’re looking for without looking too hard.

MEWAN homepage

The idea behind the mewan design (which by the way was pure XHTML& CSS) was to represent Manchester at the same time as being very clear and easily navigable. Manchester’s skyline was (and still is) going through somewhat of a renaissance at the time with an emphasis upon white and lots of natural light and that is what I tried to encapsulate in my design.

MEWAN logo

The logo needed to be plain and simple, with the colours already determined by the site design, the only thing left was the font. It was decided that miriam looked good. The fact that it was sans-serif made it easy to read so I went with that. My decisions was based heavily upon advice from the Manchester Digital Development Agency who helped me make choices when my knowledge of fonts was somewhat naive.

MEWAN courses:

I undertook the task of creating a dynamic website that would display the courses on offer from the Manchester Education Partnership’s Primary Team, with a view to next year’s placement student developing the idea if successful.

The idea was not to allow people to book online but merely see what was on offer from MEP.

The site used a very simple admin area so updating courses at the end and start of term was as seamless as possible.

I used Dreamweaver MX 2004 quite heavily in the design of this site. DW’s Applications became a great friend of mine by doing most of the legwork leaving me to simply delve into the PHP on rare occasions to personalise the software.

The design is based around the original MEWAN theme having the same logo but was a little less cluttered with a softer feel. The header features an image of Manchester Town Hall, which I took myself.

MEWAN promotion

Postcards, 2m*2m pop-up displays you name it we did it when promoting the idea of MEWAN to schools.

Since working on MEWAN my skills have come on leaps and bounds in both coding and design. I wouldn’t dream of using Dreamweaver’s Applications now to code a site but at the time it was a great assistance in helping me to learn. My design skills have also improved and although I am extremely proud of the MEWAN designs I can easily admit that they have their flaws and I could create a much stronger design today than I did in 2004.

Disclaimer: MEWAN was redesigned in April 2005 by successors at Manchester Education Partnership and replaced with table-based layout complete.