Re-designing b:web

Re-desiging our own website was always going to be a challenge.  We tend not to leave our websites static for very long and are continually making small updates but essentially the previous version of our site was around 18 months old and in that short space of time lots of things have changed, both inside our business and also in terms of technology.

We started by looking at the elements that we wanted to use and the logo was a very good starting point since it included those little arrows and the dots in the colon.  We’ve kept the same color palette as before but toned down our use of the green and even the purple takes a bit of a back seat with just a scattering in the text.

Now that our team has grown we are taking on a variety of challenging projects and the focus of the the new home page is really to showcase our work.  We have removed the blog feed, for us the blog should drive traffic into the website and not the other way around.

The real challenge was the layout.  I felt like I wanted to avoid the obvious layouts (content area on the left and then promo boxes on the right) so that we could properly showcase what we can do and give the content some space to breath.  In a way the content on our new website is the design.  The longer, full width pages have become increasingly popular over the last 12 months or so as they look amazing on the laptop, mobile and tablets meaning that no mobile version is required. We did experiment with a responsive design (one where the layout changes depending on screen size) but in all honestly we felt that the design could hold it’s own on any devise.

In terms of content, we’ve had a major cull.  Previously our website included a full page for each of our services and was really bloated with lots of text.  We’ve taken the best bits and condensed the copy down to just 6 pages and then of course the blog.

The blog section has been gifted a brand new look and feel.  All of the content is the same but now the home page has a layout that focuses just on the most recent articles, with a caption and image for each.  Clicking through to the blog post pages provides all the usual navigation and links back into our website.

Finally we have poured lots and lots of love into our portfolio pages.  Instead of the small thumbnails in an image area with a scroll,we now have great big page banners and full width screen shots.  Each portfolio page is bespoke depending on the nature of the project.  The downside is that they may take a little longer to load but we think that they are worth it!

A small update will be due in a week or so which will include a mobile blog them and possibly a mobile version of the portfolio pages.  The feedback so far has been incredible and we’ve already been shortlisted for a CSS web design award!