We recently redesigned our site. Why did we do this so fast? Because our earlier version felt incomplete and wasn’t giving the right message about what we do and how we do it, also the design wasn’t giving us the feeling we were looking for when we browsed it.
We decided to go with something a lot simple, something minimal that would be easy to read, easy to browse, simple to add more content and more sections (this was impossible in the earlier layout because we need to respect our grid system).This was the final result and we are proud to say that we love it.
The challenges were quite awesome and fun from every point of view. Florin took his grids to the next level drawing something scalable and elegant that would allow us to use most of the content we already had from the previous version including the expression engine weblogs with all the custom fields we already had.
Initially we wanted to go for a HTML5 markup but the time frame was too small and considering the poor support and the shit load of bugs necessary for IE we decided to keep it XHTML Strict. The markup is as simple as it can get (from my point of view at least), but I believe there is room for improvement. All the fading and project image navigation is achieved with 1 simple plugin that I totally fell in love with (jQuery Cycle, thanx Matt for this), so that turned out to be an unexpected surprise.
Adding the Avenir font face using cufon (witch in my opinion was the best solution because there’s not much text that you would want to copy paste from around the site) had it’s ups and downs: implementation was beyond simple, no extra margins or crap in the markup, hover support (buggy with sifr, not supported by flir or typeface.js), had to use quite an ugly hack to achieve the tabbing between different elements on the site (project image list, contact page switch between map and form).
The job form. We wanted a friendly approach to the people that want to join our team. The huffduffer signup form seemed like a very interesting solution but it raised/raises a lot of controverse because of the idea itself. We decided we’d go with it because it’s a beyond elegant and friendly solution that suited our needs and ideas, so to everyone saying “you stole that”, think about the stuff you saw on other people’s websites that “inspired you in a really creative way”. A major problem with the job form was the upload CV option witch is the result of Courtney’s effort to get that working properly on all OS (you all know Mac and Windows Flash Players are totally different right?). Also we had quite an argument/debate on wether to make the Thank You text the submit button or have a separate submit button under the phrase. Some people found it natural to click the Thank You text others had the reflex to look for the Send/Submit button before anything else, eventually we found a middle way that says Send and Thank you at the same time.
Also we’d like to thank everyone for the lovely feedback we’ve been getting, the www love and anyone who gave their 2 cents about how can we make it better and create an even more beautiful experience.
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Razvan
