We decided to give our site and brand a bit of a face lift over
the past month, to try and bring our services and portfolio a bit
more up to date and focus on the three main areas where we get a
lot work.
I have to say it was pretty hard to do! We literally must of
have gone through 6 or 7 different designs before we settled on one
we all liked. As anyone else in this industry knows, trying to
redesign your own site is a nightmare.
From finding the time internally to spend on the research,
design, development and build, to actually coming up with something
you like for more than a day. We started off by making sure
we were all clear on the design style the site needed to be, also
what the site needed to achieve and focus on and what it shouldn't
have.
- Not as much fluff, straight to the point
- Promote core services
- Nice typography
- Promote our location (As we tend to stick to local'ish
work)
- More vibrant brand colour
- Clean and easy to read
- Definitely no large 'token' hero image in a slider on the home
page
- Show client work on as many pages as possible
After our little brainstorming session, we put pencil to paper
and after a few hours had a really nice site design sketched out
and we knew where we were going with it. At this point we
decided to have a bit of an inspiration snoop around the 'bigger
agencies' to see how they were handling everything.
There were loads that we liked (more than I could list
here)! From the really clean, vibrant and easy to navigate
site of FreshEgg, to the slick design
of Branded3
and then all the way up north to the impressive and well thought
out site of ScreenMedia.
We got a lot of ideas from them, and it helped us refine our
sketched design a little more and identified some little
annoyances. One of these 'annoyances' from the previous site was
the portfolio layout just looked a bit boring, and 'samey' like
every other agency. There is not much you can do with a portfolio
page unless you REALLY go to town on it, but with our time
limitations we just had the generic open MacBook Pro (Or Mac
Monitor) showing the client site repeated side by side down
the page.
As well as this we realised every revision of our site for the
past two years has pretty much had the same footer! Simply listing
our latest blog(s) along with a small address tucked in the corner,
so we were racking our brains to come up with ideas to focus a bit
more on promoting our location/how easy we are to find.
From a bit more 'inspiration snooping' we stumbled across a web design company in
surrey called Kyan, there site is fantastic (We love
the HTML5 slider) and their portfolio layout is very
similar to what we had already. But they are using a lot of
different devices (Not just the damn open MacBook
Pro!) to present their work.
We really liked this idea as not everyone relates to the MacBook
(Especially as we predominately use Microsoft based
technologies), so went about sourcing a load of different
device images that we could use on our site. And we think they work
really well, especially the tablets as we all know how popular they
are becoming. So we must give a 'tip of the hat' to Kyan for
the idea.
Typically… Some ideas didn't make it into this revision of the
site due to time limitations between client work. Including a
little 'Easter egg' HTML5 game which is about 50% developed, and
some other useful widgets. But we intend to add these little
touches and ideas over the next few weeks/months (Best intentions
and all that).
