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In general, most buttons on TechWizard are much bigger than normal, in accordance with Fitt's law and visibility assuming a generally older population.  Each page is very minimalistic to prevent confusion.  We tried to create categories that we thought would appeal to users based off what we gleamed from talking with them.

Implementation

TechWizard is a fairly simple site with a simple backend.  For the tutorial listing, code pulls category and tutorial information from a simple JSON database.  Since we did not produce a full websites worth of content, most of this 'dynamic' data is actually the same data loaded for most requests.  Tutorial pages are hardcoded, but they make use of includes to have a common header, footer, and other common elements.

When we made the decision to  structure the site into specific categories, each with subcategories, we were unwittingly laying out a database schema that was had to obey during our implementation.  Our choice to not use a templating engine due to external factors made it more difficult to develop but ultimately doesn't effect the final appearance or usability of the site.

Evaluation

We presented users with the following Briefing and tasks list, and also had the user explore the site afterwards.

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User testing the various prototypes also rapidly revealed design issues that we hadn't though of, in particular many things seemed obvious to users that were not obvious to us.

If we had more time, we would've liked to explore making a site with Rails or another templating engine.  Unfortunately, the simplicity of TechWizard and the time commitment we each faced forced us to go the simple route.