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A bit about our new site.

Posted on 23. Apr, 2010 by Iain Malloy in Design, Recent Work

Designer’s websites should be living documents – regularly being updated with fresh work in particular. The previous incarnation of our site was not that; it had been static for way too long. So late last year we began re-designing our site and investigating the various content-management systems available.

CMS & Themes
We spoke with developers and looked widely at what was available but kept coming back to WordPress, for a number of reasons which I won’t bore you with (contact me if you really want to know).

That then lead us to the question of how to ‘skin’ the site, which we have done using the ‘Coffee Break’ theme from WooThemes as the basis. I can imagine a few gasps of “What!? You didn’t design and build the site from scratch?” – actually we did, but the development costs of what we had designed would have been astronomical. Using a theme meant that the back-end was effectively done already, it simply needed a fresh face and our own content.

The face is done, the content is a work-in-progress.

Fonts
One of the biggest bugbears that designers have with the web is the limited amount of fonts available for use across browsers. Whilst working on the re-design, we came across Typekit, and have used it on this site. We are huge fans of ‘Museo Sans’, the font which we have used.

Set-up
Re-designing the site has come at a time when we are incredibly busy with design projects, so a decision was made to outsource the site set-up. Through the connection power of Twitter, we engaged Craig Stewart at Designko in Australia to help us build the site. He did this in record time and was (is) great to work with.

Where’s the Portfolio?
We have eight months worth of work to collate and figure out what to feature. In an ideal world, a large amount of this will happen over the last week of April, so watch this space…

Early days
This new site is still in its infancy, so will grow and change as we come to grips with WordPress and as the work continues to flow. We look forward to using the blog to engage, educate and inform and welcome constructive feedback and comment.