My Website Redesign: Looking Forward. Looking Back.

When it came time to redesign my website, I found myself wrangling with a handful of issues that required a great deal of thought and reflection. Should I blog? Should I moved to a more content-driven design? What, if anything, do I want to salvage from my existing site? What CMS should I use? And within each issue live a million little gremlins that have clearly been fed after midnight. So now that I've gotten this far, I figure I should shed some light on my reasons for the decisions I've made.

A Clear Objective

When redesigning a website, it's important to look at the big picture, and determine what the goals and objectives of your website is. My main goal was to better position myself within the market. Instead of being a cool "designer", I needed to communicate that my expertise goes far beyond pushing pixels, and expands to brand management. This meant changing my site from what was basically just a portfolio showcasing my work, to one which showcases my knowledge and experience. This meant adding much more content, explaining the solutions I've crafted, and how they've addressed the issues each company faced. I also could use a vehicle to explain new technologies and trends in the advertising and design world. That meant starting a blog... a decision that I came to after much debate.

Welcome to the Blogosphere

This was an important decision, and one that needed to be addressed first. My East Coast upbringing has definitely made me a critical decision maker, and when this question was posed, I instantly thought of a handful of reasons NOT to blog....
A) Everyone blogs... is what I have to say anything truly of interest? Or am I just adding to the digital hiss?
B) Who'd bother to read me? I'm no industry celeb or socialite, so does my experience warrant attention?
C) Am I ready for the upkeep? When well done, blogging requires a considerable amount of time and effort.
D) What the hell would I even write about anyway?!

I decided to attack D) first. I'm not one for a personal blog, but a chronicle of my industry observations would be interesting, if for my own edification. After all, I didn't go to school strictly for art, and the core of my college education was in Letters (and there's a 120 page thesis on my bookshelf to prove it!). So what would I discuss? The answer was all around me... It's what I work with everyday. As a print and web designer, I face numerous challenges in many fields, and in each of those challenges is a lesson. The challenges, the solutions, the experiences... all are worth my noting, even if it only serves as an online journal of my career. Not to mention the SEO benefits...

The blog format would also lend itself to better showcasing my work. Not only would it show a chronological evolution of my skills and talents, but it would allow me to better showcase the challenges faced within each project, and how I chose to solve them. This could be valuable information to potential clients, looking to understand how I work, and how to approach a similar project. And in my mind, an educated client is the best kind. Any insight I can provide to improve the client/designer relationship, and help my clients make better informed decisions is a worthwhile venture. So i figured, if no one else but my clients read my blog, it will still prove beneficial.

It would also help position myself better within my industry, both amongst fellow designers and with potential clients. A well-written blog showcasing your expertise is great for any company in any industry – a fact I often impress upon my clients. If I dedicate the time on it, the results will manifest themselves. I've seen clients eager to start blogging let their blogs quickly spiral into disrepair, and there is truly no greater way to show your customers you just don't give a crap then by not keeping your blog current. If I am to better convince my clients of the importance of blogging and social media, i should, in essence, completely whore myself out the the gods of online marketing and show them how all of the aspects of web design can work to provide an improved user experience (UX), and create a greater sense of trust in the marketplace. Fostering a sense of community is important... people are dedicated to brands that take great care of them, and repeat business is at the heart of any successful business.

While the blog will help better position me within the design marketplace, it was only half on the solution. How I chose to present my portfolio was the other half.

Presentation that suits the content

Saying goodbye to my old site wasn't easy. I loved my old site, and the feedback I got from it was never anything but incredibly positive. While I will forever love that site design, it wasn't built to support a more content-driven website model, and the site itself overpowered the work I was showing. I decided to ditch the deep colors and textural backgrounds for a design that let my work do the talking, not my site design.

However, there was much here worth evolving. Just as the fish slowly evolved feet from flippers, so my site has been a steady evolution of my design skills in a rapidly changing online environment. The design I launched in 2003 was the first to contain my name and site navigation in a slim horizontal bar, and this minimalist approach resonated. As my site evolved and I began using unique page designs for each section of my portfolio, the slim horizontal bar became an extremely effective at creating a sense of uniformity and structure to unique designs. This was important... without some sense of uniformity, particularly in the header and navigation, these unique design idea would become an utter failure, and would simply frustrate my visitors.

This bar has once again survived the evolution process, but this time was moved to the very top of the page. My previous site design was simply a portfolio site, but a content-driven format like this one made real-estate a premium, and I was gaining little from the negative space around the old floating bar. By placing it atop the page, I can not only enlarge the text on the bar, but I can give the content more room. It also allows me greater flexibility for my unique page designs. While the bar itself is nothing fancy, it proves the effectiveness of simple, clean, structural elements and how they can be used to great effect. Its an effect that is used widely across the web.

But with these unique page designs, there was much to consider. While my previous site relied heavily on interesting wallpapers and snazzy color schemes, the new design is focused on showcasing the work I've done. My portfolio covers a wide list of services, each in itself a lucrative niche for a designer, and each with different needs and different final products. The fundamental question here was presentation.

Would I present a logo the same way I would a website, or a print ad? No, i wouldn't.

Websites are complex, intricate, and interactive, requiring multiple screenshots and greater description of both the graphical and technical elements. A logo is simple, direct and iconic, and if well designed, shouldn't require one word of explanation. This further convinced me that each page needed to have its own personality, showcasing the featured works in a format that suits it best. Sure, I could use a standard thumbnail/modal window format to make a single, uniform design work, but this began feeling like the easy way out. It's effective, to be sure, and used throughout the web, but what it didn't do was give my site a way to stand out from the crowd. Here I had a chance to create a more unique user experience, and add a bit of "wow" (or at least "neat") to the site, something a uniform templated solution wouldn't accomplish.

My website design page allows me to show multiple views of webpages, while also containing plenty of room for content describing each project as well as the different aspects of the website development process. I chose a dark color here, allowing my designs, many of which feature a white background and intricate details, would stand out clearly from the rest of the page. For my logo design page, I chose the opposite approach... using a white background with minimal content so the logo stands out on the page, unfettered and free from distraction. This design approach led to my standard blog page design as well, where the text and the images contained therein dominate your focus. For my print design page, I went with a newspaper design, for the instantaneous connection it makes. As my newspaper and magazine ads tend to be vertical, i needed a layout that would showcase these projects best, with the descriptions placed to the side.

A Splash of Personality

The day I first learned about CSS, I thought about how powerful it was, and how a well-built framework could be easily customized with nothing more than linking to a new CSS file. I used this concept in a couple client projects, and on my previous site, with fantastic results. In my case, I used unique designs to present my portfolio more effectively, and in a few cases, decorate my blog pages with unique designs. I've seen this idea utilized on a few other designers' sites recently, with unique designs for blog entries. It's a fantastic idea, and one I've been preaching for years. It seems my lack of a blog prevented me from being credited in any way with this concept, but I've seen quite a few articles talking about this being the future of blogs. However, I tend to agree with this article, stating how in most instances, it's been sadly used as window dressing for poor content.

There is a great deal of potential here, and I hope it's not lost on the design and publishing industry. In fact, one of my greatest critiques of the magazine industry is its utter failure in adopting such practices. What reader love about printed magazines are the unique article designs, yet magazines fail to incorporate this into their online versions. Maybe if they did this, they'd have another reason to charge for their content, and create a more profitable online business model. But I digress...

And taking a chance on a more design-intensive development experience meant using a CMS that could handle my unique needs. For that, I chose Expression Engine because of it's incredible flexibility and outstandingly robust backend. Needless to say, I'm a fan.

After all the work is done (and it's not yet), I feel the result is a definite improvement, though I think I'll let my 2010 receivables be the final judge.