Oh dear, not another redesign

It was never planned to be this way but it’s become something of a tradition that once a year we redesign this website.

With the web moving at such a pace it’s not necessarily a bad thing to make sure our website doesn’t stagnate and become outdated. Our clients present and future all look to our website as a showcase of just what we can do. The websites content, design and implementation all work to communicate our capabilities, and show to our customers we are just as awesome as we know we are.

Something new for 2012 and beyond

But for 2012 it was right to try and break this cycle and create something that in a year’s time still represented us as a company and also was representative of the work we do. For the first time in a few years we wanted to try and create a website that might just see a second birthday. To do this we had to put every part of the website under a microscope, and be brutal about the changes we made.

As we do with all our client work we asked questions like ‘Is this beneficial?’, ‘Does it work? ’, ‘Have we used this to its full potential?’ and ‘Does it actually provide real benefits to those people using our website?’ These questions and more were asked and the results make up this new website.

Clean Design

The most obvious change is the look of the design, gone is the blue background texture and the somewhat pastel section colours. Instead we’ve gone for a cleaner interface with more white and a change to include brighter colours that bring with them a more energetic look.

In 2011 we added some great ideas to our website but even the greatest ideas have a shelf life and so things like the homepage scrolling banner and the colour co-ordinated services section have gone or been scaled back. As new things have been added to our website it’s always been our job to take stock and see if we can improve what we’ve done previously. In the case of a sliding banner the best way to improve this was to remove it and use what was a large area of the old website more efficiently.

Responsive Web Design

One of the biggest steps forward in the web community in 2011 was the concept of Responsive Web Design. In a nutshell this allows us to build a single website that adjusts itself based on the device a person is using. If you’ve not come across this idea before then play with the width of your browser and you’ll see what we mean.

The benefits of this are to ensure an optimal experience for all users, no matter what type or size of device they are using. We even took that extra step of cleaning up some images that usually appear fuzzy on the super sharp retina display of the iPhone.

Content front and centre

Long pages of content can always be a turn off for many Internet users even if that content is highly engaging and interesting. In the Internet age and with the success of services like Twitter we’ve become creatures that prefer to consume small bite size pieces of information rather than long essays or articles.

It’s one thing to create a good looking and functional website to sell ourselves but this always must work in conjunction with our content that most accurately communicates the type of services we offer. This year we’ve put a lot of effort into making this more engaging, going as far as to have some rewritten just to be sure it’s a perfect as it can be.

But also navigating around this content is another important part of any website, our last website separated the news from our main navigation and the services section involved a lot of clicking back and forth through the different pages. It’s these things we’ve previously overlooked so now we have a full services navigation in the ‘What we do’ section and as well as moving the news (now Our ideas) to the main navigation these pages also include the ability to search through our archive of news stories.

Enough explaining

That’s enough explaining about what we’ve done to this new website and time for you to look around and hopefully enjoy the fruits of our labour.

As always if you want to; don’t hesitate to contact us, even if it’s just to tell us you like our new website.