Ginzola.com - the making of the site and the new brand
It may sound egotistical for a web designer to hark on about the 'making' of their new website, but this site does showcase a number of new things certainly at least to me. In the management of this project, I have not shyed away from newness in the interests of achieving something a little different, and also to learn a thing or two. I think the best thing is to look at the development chronologically, and pick out the interesting bits!
May 2010
I worked with Matthew Fairweather design to get a new logo and general corporate get-up. I have known Matt for some time, and love his ultra clean 'down to business' approach to graphics. He is unafraid to take a good idea and to run with it, without distraction. How he manages to keep ideas through to completion in such a pure form, I will never know, but the result of the consultancy is plain to see. Ginzola was in a stroke (at least on paper) transformed from a one-man, slightly comical outfit into a much sharper and more corporate organisation. This was precisely my brief. Someone said to me recently that the new look is corporate, but maintains an edge of the funness, and this is exactly right. We don't do anything that we don't enjoy. Or at least we try not to!
So, the new brand was born, and I set about creating a new focus for the site.
Reorganisation
Any website that grows organically will have certain areas that are littered with content, and others that are devoid of change. When one is close to it, i.e. inside the company who owns a site, one cannot really see the problem. Outsiders find these sites difficult to get value from. My 'ginzola.com' was no exception. It was a mish-mash of ideas and developments. There was not real focus of service or anything. Yes, it looked ok, and was fun, but the site was essentially unchanged since I started in 2007. Yes, there were a lot of new pages, but these did not help the core point of the site, which was to promote me as a consultant, and not to promote ginzola as a brand.
The task was to completely (and without flinching) take apart the site map, and to focus on what ginzola is going to be doing over the next few years... SEO.
The site focuses on web optimisation, which encompasses all sorts of things, usability, does the site work well for visitors? coding, does it work for google? content, does the site push the right buttons? etc. Then we have the 'Active Domains' product that is exciting, and as has been proven a valuable add on to a well optimised site. Finally there is a new area, email communications.... And here is the tough part... no more. Yes we do web design all the time, or course we do, but this is not advertised. We do computer support. I have contacts who help Clients all over the place, but I don't advertise it. This is my new thinking for the 2010s... web sites need to be stripped as much as possible of anything that does not contribute to the CORE PURPOSE.
... so the new site map was built...
Design
The design is still a work in progress, but it follows the excellent brand guidelines set down by Matt Fairweather. The site is built upon a CMS system called modx that is a little stark for some, but is wonderfully adaptable to all my crazy little widgets that needed to be transferred from the old website.
Notice how the colour scheme changes as you go round the site? It's mainly blue, but there when a page is created, you can choose which colour set it belongs to. This is to reflect the 3 subject areas. Just for a change, this one is red!
Flash
The old site used a lot of Flash. With the iPhone/iPad and Apple's love of Flash...er..no, I meant hatred!! I have tried to eliminate all dependency on the system. The 'slider' is a nice visual way of getting the message across, and there are some other subtleties that all work on these mobile devices.
Portfolio
The portfolio page DOES use flash. It is an off-the-shelf (www.activeden.net) system that I have written a customised snipped for Modx to drive. It will show the newest items in the portfolio section. The modx snippet generates on the fly correctly sized thumbnails, and summarises the pages. It is with systems like this that companies can deliver a well unified and slick presence that is updated without excessive overheads. Someone makes new pages, and the front shows all the links. The home page shows the newest or highest prioritised items, the menus update, etc.
Incidentally, if Flash is turned off, the system displays a list like the other main pages.
303 redirects
Thank you John for creating this lovely little snippet of code that intelligently redirects against a database of the most popular pages from the old site to their new site equivalents.
September 6th - Launch!
Almost without hitch too, and on time.
Conclusion
It's not been an easy ride, but this site marks a transition from ginzola's home-brew CMS to a standard one that is able to adopt at will any idea or gadget that springs to mind. It is incredibly easy to modularise. On this page there are links to facebook and twitter feeds. There is no code visible in the editor, nor in any templates or pages. It is all tucked away neatly. Its a system that reay does allow Users of different skill levels to contribute. The coders can get on with the mucky parts of the system; the content writers get a nice easy to use system.
Yes, I think its the solution I have been waiting for for some considerable time!