Redesign

Here’s something we’ve been working on for a while now; an all new design! If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, please click through and check it out!

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Nicer than the old version?

Goals for the Redesign

We had some very clear goals in mind with this redesign:

  1. Greater emphasis on our design services.
  2. Better integration of PliablePress links.
  3. Improved “sectioning” (i.e. Services area vs. Blog area).

Our design services are the bread and butter of the site, but until now, they’ve always just been one page that gets a link on different corners of the blog. We wanted to show that the two are equal in importance, rather than the services being just a subset of the blog.

The new homepage is intended to be a big part of that, with a lot of real estate given to the Services and PliablePress, not just the blog. And it gave us the chance to give a proper overview of what the site does to first time visitors with our headline:

In terms of the actual design style; we obviously wanted to make the site look nicer, but that’s a little too general to be a real goal. So our goal was to do this in a way that brought more color into the site and gave a very unique and memorable look.

This choice of style is purely because we’re a design team, so our site needs to showcase what we can do in a creative way.

Typography

Improving some of our typography was one of the main reasons for the redesign (To be more specific, getting rid of the fonts I’d used on our post titles was the main reason I was dying to redesign). In the new site, I think we’ve done that well.

Our fonts are now powered by Typekit, so we had a great selection of stunning fonts at our disposal. We’re using the lovely FF Meta Web Pro for a number of titles around the site, and Sorts Mill Goudy for various buttons (And our post titles are in good old-faithful Arial).

Aside from font selection, another thing I’m happy to have improved is our bullet points. We use them a lot in articles, but they vary from only a few words per bullet, to a few lines. That made spacing the bullets out quite awkward.

  • But now, at last
  • we have a nicer design
  • that can handle either.

Yay!

Advertising

The last thing to mention is the 125 by 125 ads in the blog sidebar. A little over a year ago I took all ads off this blog (Largely to make room for PliablePress banners), but now that we’ve built the PliablePress links more effectively into the design, it leaves plenty of room in the sidebar for some tasteful square ads again.

So with that in mind, if you’d like to advertise here, you can do on our BuySellAds page. The current cost is $99 for 30 days (The ads aren’t on the homepage, so it will work out around 120,000 pageviews from 80,000 uniques). And as a little bonus, I’ll tweet/Facebook the first 4 advertisers who join us (Around 10,000 combined followers).

How Did We Do?

Naturally, everything I’ve said above is just what I hoped the redesign will do. The real test is how it actually does. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Anything we did well? Or poorly? Better or worse than our previous?

And if you spot any bugs, please do let me know!

PS – We’re still putting on the last layer of polish, so you may notice some area not quite complete yet (e.g. the portfolio listing just one site right now! ;) )

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