Sep 11 2009
You may have noticed that we've redecorated again (unless of course you're reading this in your RSS reader, in which case you'll need to hop over to the website and take a look). We actually launched this new look late last night (Thursday). No blog entry accompanied it this morning, not for a lack of wanting, but purely because there were things to tend to. But that doesn't mean we're not excited! If you compare the old and the new, the changes aren't super significant once you get beyond the window dressing:
Previous 420 Creative website (click to enlarge)
New 420 Creative website (click to enlarge)
The look and feel
The overall look and feel is definitely different - bluer and using a tighter grid and typographical rhythm than before. But the concept and basic layout is essentially the same. Why? Because it has worked for about 2 years. Truth be told, we had received enough compliments on the previous design that it wasn't an easy decision to redesign.
So my solution was to choose a middle road and create a new look and feel based on the general layout of the previous but simply clean it up even further. The biggest visual changes are the textures, transparencies and imagery. The images we had for our headers previously are gone - although that doesn't mean they're gone permanently; I've yet to live with it for a while. And the skyline image at the bottom is drastically different. I decided to go for a grungier, almost cinematic feel to add more texture and depth. Plus, I love Portland so it felt right to show it off more. :) And of course, I had to add a few flashy elements (like the way our contact form gets accessed from our contact page).
While the reasoning might seem gratuitous, it was actually a conscious decision for design reasons. It's also a declaration of sorts on moving forward with web technology rather than trying to keep making things work in older browser. This site flat out looks like crap in IE6. And I'm okay with that. (Actually I'm happy about it.) I may decide to create a specific IE6 page (á la Unit Interactive) later on.
The content
The content is very much the same as before with a few changes here. This was intentional.
For the past month or two we've ramped up our own SEO strategies and while we have a long way to go, things have been working. A lot of that has to do with our content, so it needed to stay almost identical as before. If anything, any copy changes were made for SEO reasons rather than design and content reasons. I can't get into it anymore but that's also why the home page has been cleaned up quite a bit as far as content goes. But it was also a usability decision. While the blog is a vital part of our site, it's a bit more important to showcase our work and our primary services. After all, that's what keeps us in business. :)
While I think it was the right decision, time and our site metrics will tell for sure.
The back end
This is where the majority of the work took place really. As you may know already, our site runs on ExpressionEngine. It's worked well and it continues to run on EE. The challenge was cleaning up the way the site was originally organized. I won't bore you with details, but let's just say I trimmed it from roughly 17 (!) weblogs/sections down to seven. Big difference as far as remembering where all our content is.
Summing up
All in all, this redesign took around 20-25 hours, give or take, all of which was done in my spare time over the past couple of months. I'm pretty happy with it and expect it'll be around for at least another couple years (with some tweaks here and there I'm sure).