Mar 05 2010
If you've visited our website in the past few weeks you will have no doubt noticed that we revamped. It was only a few months ago that we redid the look/feel for this site, which isn't that long. But the thing is, it was time. Here's why...
Whoa! Info overload!
While the previous design wasn't terrible, it ended up getting out of control as far as content and messaging goes. No matter what page you went to, there was a lot to digest. It felt like we were trying to throw way too much info and include every bit of seemingly important content onto any given page. It ended up feeling a bit contrived, overwhelming and just out of sync with our usual clean and simple (yet engaging and sometimes powerful) style. So that lead me to focus on three key things to the redesign:
- Simplify
- Simplify
- Simplify
Um, I'm kinda lost!
I wouldn't necessarily say the previous site was confusing in any way, but because each page tried to do so much, the overall messaging and the message for each page got a tad bit tangled up and became unclear. This new design keeps things ultra-simple. One message to convey, making it easier to digest the info and to a degree, leaving visitors wanting more (or so that's the idea).
A better home page
One of the pages that just became bloated with info was the home page. But with the redesign I really took minimum as far as I could while keeping in mind good content for visitors and search engines, not to mention links to key areas.
On the previous site's home page, one thing that really stood out was the headline (which hasn't changed), and the featured work samples were a bit small and didn't say much except for a weak "Hey, I'm here. Click me?" Not good enough. Our work is the reason people hire us (duh), so it needed to be much more front and center. And that's why I included the slider you see now. It showcases our most recent work in a much cooler, more effective manner and allows us to carry the same tone in our page content to get people interested in the highlighted projects.
Focus!
As I've sort of alluded to, the different sections of the site got a tad bit overwhelming and provided more information than was necessary (or that could have been condensed and more succinctly put). I had a hunch that people just didn't care much about some of the deeper pages we had. Seeing the visits on individual pages proved that I was right. So it was important to keep the site's sections as flat as possible. The idea was to refocus each page to a single idea.
Hey, lighten up will ya?
Although I liked the previous design, I got sick of it real quick. And part of what bothered me is that it was rather dark. Not as dark as any of these, but dark enough to bother me. Not that I have anything against dark-themed websites - there are plenty that I think are pretty hot. But considering our brand and our collateral (invoices, proposals, business cards, etc.), it didn't really fit. So it was time to lighten up.
The addition of blue tones to our color palette has evolved over the past year and with this redesign, that really came to surface. Blue, of course, can quickly become dark if you're not careful, so I made it a point to keep the gamut a bit wide. The use of white completely counters the darker blue hues though and helps me reach the goal of keeping the color palette light and bright.
HTML5 is sexy
Having read about it, and hearing about it from fellow developers, I started learning some about HTML 5 in late December-early January. And as geeky as it sounds, HTML5 is damn sexy. More importantly, it's where the Web is going. Period. No, it's not fully supported by all browsers but there are workarounds (just like there are workarounds, kludges, patches and hacks for making a site "work" in IE6).
The thing is, as a web development company, it's important for us to keep up with what's going on, and what better way to do that than to implement new technologies on our own site? It beats trying it on a client site first to only have it backfire on us. Redesigning this site gave me the opportunity to use it as a guinea pig for building in HTML5. It's missing some key things that HTML5 offers (<nav>, <footer>, anyone?), but it's a start. And it's given me a chance to set us in motion for HTML5 for client sites (without it backfiring).
CSS3 rocks my world
Like HTML5, CSS3 isn't fully supported by all browsers, but it's a beautiful thing. I started using a lot of CSS3 with the previous design - so much so that things started to get a little crazy and the look and feel became a little convoluted. So with the redesign I tried to use CSS3 in places that made sense and would degrade gracefully for those less than cool browsers (uh, that means you, IE). And truth be told, we're so over IE6 (at least for our site).
Hey, what about EE?
Since the release of EE 2.0 (and perhaps thinking about it since the first private betas), I wanted to upgrade this site to it. But we do use several add-ons that when the new design launched just weren't available for 2.0. A lot of our core add-ons have since become EE 2.0 compatible, so an upgrade isn't too far off.
So uh, whaddya think?
That's pretty much the gist of why it felt like the right time to redesign. So tell me, what do you think?