Craigslist Redesign Concepts

I had a little bit of extra time today, so I decided to focus on my design skills and try to re-design Craigslist.

Admittedly, this isn't the most ambitious take on it that you may ever see. A lot of designers have pushed themselves to make a version that include a lot of graphics and neat features. I wanted to sort of take another approach, focusing namely on what the site has now and making it look better. While the design I did for Model Mayhem was a lot more ambitious, the market was also there for something more intense. Craigslist, on the other hand, is modeled to be simple, efficent, and focus on the ability to post and improve, similar to the UK Government website.

One thing I thought of was what it would take to implement a design like this. After all my time at both a company that had a 10+ year old website, as well as working with multiple companies wiht infastructures over the years, most businesses don't like the idea of doing a major overhaul of a website that already works as-is. Why would they? They're making money, and its doing what they want. At the same time, sites need to adapt and change based on the people who are using it. My design was the best of both worlds; keeping most of the stuff they have while improving the overall look and feel.

I didn't get too far, and the interior pages need work. My focus was the front page which, when you begin to disect it, is actually fairly complex. A lot of the appeal of the main page is actually the fact that everything is there with no images, which I think a lot of people get. I've added a drop-down for "About" and "help", only because it made more sense to condense that and allow you to look at them on every page instead of just the home page.

The continual header on the site was focused on the idea of being able to search the site and change your location as needed. Say you were looking for a TV in New York City but meant to search Philadelphia.

It isn't done, but I at least wanted to get a start.