We've made a decent living out of it for the last 10 years but now it seems the good times are about to stop. The cat is out of the bag - you don't need designers to do your website ..... I may as well be the first to let you know .... all the help you need for design is now here;
http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/
Anyone need a dedicated, motivated and passionate Managing Director around the Leicester area????
Gary McCarthy,
www.eazytiger.net
Thursday, 21 February 2008
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
Huge Website Improvements Minimal Effort!
Hi All,
Sorry my blogging has been tardy recently.... we've been busy re-branding the city of Leicester along with some major work for clients like Xerox and Tesco!!
This lack of time extends to updating our website - but I've learnt some valuable lessons (or remembered some) so i thought it would be good to share....
About two weeks ago I lost patience with the fact that we are web designers and yet we had a home page i hated.
It really needed some "wow factor" adding to the very informative layout that we had. One of the two images we had on a very visible part of our home page was very poor and i particularly disliked. So in the absence of a good portion of time to think through a strategy and make a proper job from day one we did things in a "maximum impact" way.
The theory being make the changes that take the least time but create the most impact and keep the train rolling in the right direction. The first thing we did was to remove the annoying image, creating more space and instantly giving everything else on the page more room for impact. Cost? A few minutes.
Next we re-jigged the layout and gave more impact to the navigation, we did this at the next available opportunity a few days later. Cost? about 6hrs.
This new layout relied on the impact being made by a flash movie in the centre of the screen - but we didn't have time to develop one that we'd be proud of - so we placed a placeholder static image in there for a week or so. Again not ideal but still meant that the site improved even though we hadn't got time to fulfil everything we wanted to.
To come are the first iteration of a simple flash movie that will have a shelf life of a month and will take about 3 hrs. Then we'll make a real high impact flash movie that will take 2 days over the next month or so.
So what we have acheived is a constantly improving home page that will be transformed into the one that we wanted just not in one step.
Somebody told me once that the only way to eat an elephant was to make burgers out of it ..... seems to be a good way of achieving constant improvement too.
Take Care,
Gary McCarthy
Sorry my blogging has been tardy recently.... we've been busy re-branding the city of Leicester along with some major work for clients like Xerox and Tesco!!
This lack of time extends to updating our website - but I've learnt some valuable lessons (or remembered some) so i thought it would be good to share....
About two weeks ago I lost patience with the fact that we are web designers and yet we had a home page i hated.
It really needed some "wow factor" adding to the very informative layout that we had. One of the two images we had on a very visible part of our home page was very poor and i particularly disliked. So in the absence of a good portion of time to think through a strategy and make a proper job from day one we did things in a "maximum impact" way.
The theory being make the changes that take the least time but create the most impact and keep the train rolling in the right direction. The first thing we did was to remove the annoying image, creating more space and instantly giving everything else on the page more room for impact. Cost? A few minutes.
Next we re-jigged the layout and gave more impact to the navigation, we did this at the next available opportunity a few days later. Cost? about 6hrs.
This new layout relied on the impact being made by a flash movie in the centre of the screen - but we didn't have time to develop one that we'd be proud of - so we placed a placeholder static image in there for a week or so. Again not ideal but still meant that the site improved even though we hadn't got time to fulfil everything we wanted to.
To come are the first iteration of a simple flash movie that will have a shelf life of a month and will take about 3 hrs. Then we'll make a real high impact flash movie that will take 2 days over the next month or so.
So what we have acheived is a constantly improving home page that will be transformed into the one that we wanted just not in one step.
Somebody told me once that the only way to eat an elephant was to make burgers out of it ..... seems to be a good way of achieving constant improvement too.
Take Care,
Gary McCarthy
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