Okay. We sent out an issue of Spam last spring pimping our "new" Web site. So here we are with another one. What gives?
We got better. The previous site – which we liked just fine, thank you – admittedly suffered in a couple of areas. First, the goddamn contrast was too low. We took a coupla shots from an accessibility advocate for this; and as much as we liked the look of it, we had to admit that there were no solid reasons for not making a change. Secondly, the old site fell short in the SEO department: though the page structure was just fine, the titles of individual pages and URL structure carried no useful information for search. I screwed up and designed the original project records to use altogether too many clicks to get anywhere; and finally, we got some traffic from a few of your better design aggregators and took static for having small pictures.
While any one of these things could have been handled without too much trouble, all of them taken together seemed to indicate a re-architecture. The new site uses more of your screen real estate (1024 × 760 vs. 800 × 600 for the old one). The pictures are big and if you click on them they'll get even bigger, thanks to Cabel Sasser's FancyZoom. Project records now load all pictures on the same page; you navigate by scroll rather than clickthrough. The site now passes every contrast test we were able to find. We've also added a sitewide search function and a properly formatted RSS feed for Bespoke, our Weblog. Page titles and URLs are now much more friendly, both to humans and to search entities.
The whole thing is run through EllisLabs' ExpressionEngine, a powerful, flexible content management system made right here in Portland, Oregon, which allowed us to do much of the back-end work ourselves, and will allow us to make incremental changes relatively easily. Which is great, because I'd rather not do this again too soon.
Have a look, and .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) what you think. We've sweated it on IE6, IE7 and Firefox on the Windows side, and Safari and Firefox on the Mac side; if you run into something that smells gamey, give us a .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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