The New Site Look
In Need of a Little TLC.
You’ve probably noticed by now that our site has a new face. (If you haven’t, click our logo to go to the home page and check it out.) Updating our look has been a long and arduous process. Though I’ve been making small tweaks and changes to our layout and site design since I got here, we only began the process of a major remodel fairly recently.
Ever since I started here I felt our site could use a little TLC. Michael did to, but the look of our site always got pushed to the back of the to-do list when compared to other tech related jobs. I brought up the idea of a remodel again and again, but it either got pushed aside, or we only did small things at a time.
My reason for wanting a new site was this: We are a 99.9% online company. Every once and a while we get a client who actually comes to visit our shop, but every other time we interact only through our website, email, and over the phone. Since few ever meet us in person, our site becomes the surrogate us. It’s our face, all anyone ever sees of us until their design arrives. Who we are as both individuals and as a company is reflected in the look of our site. And if our site doesn’t look good, we don’t look good. Plus, who wants to spend time on an ugly site?
Finally, enough was enough, and I made it a priority to get the site redesigned in a timely manner.
Sorting out Priorities
I worked with both Michael and our site guru, Brad, to come up with a design we thought would better achieve our goals. Our primary goals were these: Create a home page that is pleasing to look at, a menu that is easier to navigate, and give first time visitors a better idea of who we are/what we do.
It was Brad who suggested a full page rotating slider. We’d had a smaller one before, but because of a pesky sidebar it wasn’t centered, and there wasn’t much flair to it. So, we found a nice plugin and I got to work filling it out with both pictures and text.
In addition to adding the slider, I centered our content, and broke things down into threes. Content was shortened, and more pictures were added. I also spent a lot of phone battery making changes, refreshing, making more changes, to make sure that everything looked as good on a phone as it did on a computer.
I also set about to find some new colors, as we all felt that our old maroon and green/blue/teal (None of us can seem to agree on what that color actually was) were too dark. I found a nice color combination generator online and began playing around. The customizer tool built into our website made it easy to test out colors, without altering the site itself. Or so I thought. We realized one Monday that a test version I had been working on had somehow gone live, and had been active all weekend. Why was this an issue? Because for testing purposes I had blacked out the entire top half of our menu, text included! We quickly fixed that, and were doubly careful with the customizer after that.
Green with Indecision
To pick our primary color, I worked backwards. I singled out and crossing off colors we definitely didn’t want—pink, orange, yellow—until we had a short list of ones that seemed okay. Then it was just a matter of finding complimentary colors to those. When we stumbled upon our current violet, it seemed perfect. It was the green that turned out to be a problem.
I argued that since our primary color was dark, our secondary should be light. That would give us a nice contrast, and keep our site from falling into the same too dark problem that had plagued our last color scheme. Michael, on the other hand, wanted it dark. For some reason, he felt very opposed to light colors in all their varieties, so our green was no different. So, I found three greens of various shades that worked, put them up on a screen, and asked various people at Tanglewood to pick their favorite.
The green on the far left was the clear winner to everyone but Michael, who liked the far right. Overruled, Michael gave me the go ahead to use the lighter color.
New and Improved
Though most of the changes we made to the site were entirely cosmetic, it was still a lot of work. The fact that none of us are graphic designers didn’t help either. There were some things we new we needed, but mostly it was just us trying to figure out what looked nice.
When everything was done and ready, we set about putting it all into place. If we were some enormous corporation with millions of site visitors per day, we probably would’ve made our changes at 2 in the morning or sometime to ensure the least amount of people were on the site as possible. But we’re not an enormous cooperation and none of us wanted to wake up at 2. So, in the middle of a Thursday we began making our changes. They went up one by one, until everything looked the way we liked. (If you happened to be on the site while we were changing things, we hope you didn’t get too confused!)
It’s been just under a month since we rolled out the new look, and we’re still making changes. Just the other day I redid our first slider image. As time goes on, you can expect to see little changes here and there, but for the most part, we’re all finally happy with the site. (I’m happy because things look good. Michael is happy because I’m not nagging him about it anymore. Brad is happy because now he can go back to his SEO work in peace!) Which means we’re free to move onto new projects.
And boy do we have new projects! What are we up to now? Take a look at the third slider on our home page.
Until next time!
Rachel
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