420 Design Blog
We’ve redecorated
03 Oct 2007 | Angie H
If you've been here before (or even in the last few weeks), you'll surely have noticed that we've torn down the old design and started fresh. This is a good thing. We think so anyway (and by we I mean our small team).
It's been a little over a year since our last redesign. In all honesty, I was fully expecting that one to stick around for another year. What I wasn't expecting was this small spurt of growth we've seen in the past 6 months or so. It was probably February sometime when I started to feel the walls closing in on the site. So, since April, it's been a side project - worked on primarily on weekends, evenings with nothing better to do and a few days when client work was down (which hasn't been often).
When I first began thinking about the site, I wasn't sure at all what direction to go in. I struggled between simply tweaking the previous design or starting over. Obviously I chose the latter. As I did research and saw current trends and compared them with our brand, our goals and our content, I realized it was appropriate for a major overhaul. It wasn't an easy decision though. We've had a lot of great compliments about our previous design and it's not like we despised it. But in the end, I think it was the right thing to do.
The look and feel
This summer we went through a slight branding realignment. Obviously we didn't re-do our logo (nor do I have the desire to), but we fine-tuned our color palette and typography. That, in a way, added momentum to the redesign of the site. With the adjusted color palette alone, the previous site instantly became outdated.
I opted for a wider layout given that only a small percent of our visitors use screens with 800x600 resolution or smaller. In fact, we have a lot of visitors with much higher resolution. That doesn't surprise me really seeing as how this has been a steady trend for the past few years. Additionally, the content started to feel cramped and in some ways so the wider layout helps partially address that.
Functionality
The previous site was 100% static, with the blog being the only exception. We were updating it every so often by hand. Not a terrible thing given what we do around here but still not great. So I finally decided to build the entire site with a stellar content management system: ExpressionEngine. This was perhaps the easiest decision throughout the whole process. I won't get into the details of ExpressionEngine (EE), but it's an incredibly flexible system. It now powers the entire 420 Design site, including the Soapbox (which was powered by WordPress prior). We rarely have to deal with code anymore (even though it's a snap for us) when updating the site. In particular, EE has made the portfolio section that much easier to update and easier to flip through.
The only downside is that the previous blog's feed is now broken (or completely gone, depending on how you look at it). So we're having to start over in that regard. But that's not a shortcoming of the software; it's simply because we made the decision (good or bad, we'll know soon enough) to change the URL of the blog and the blog's feed. So if you had subscribed to the feed prior to the redesign, you can pick up the new one at the bottom of any page on the site.
Known issues
The only known issues pertain to the blog. A lot of links are broken, as are some images. We're working on it though. We're also working on redirecting old page URLs to the appropriate new ones. Do let us know if you spot any other issues though.
So, we still have a bit of work ahead of us, but I'm very pleased with how the site has turned out. We'd love to hear your feedback!