Keep on moving

Last week I heard someone use the expression ‘The cobbler's kids have no shoes’. Having only just recently redesigned the Five Mile website I confess to feeling relieved that we have managed to find the time to avoid the common trap of not moving the website forward. In fact, our current redesign started life as nothing more than a one day 'light' refresh but soon turned into a 3 day redesign and re-write - not bad going. For those of you into Drupal theming, we were on Zen for our previous theme but this one is based on our own base theme that is evolving with every site we produce.

Our previous design was in use for a very short time, about 8 months in fact, and you might think it crazy that we started over, but we had good reasons for doing so.

Since DrupalCon DC back in March we've been brilliantly busy delivering client projects. So why put ourselves through the extra workload of a redesign? After all, it is fair to say that we had a great looking website, we were receiving great feedback and seemingly the site worked well. But for us the site wasn't flexible enough, when we actually got under the hood and looked at the analytics, looked at the way the site was used by our visitors and thought about how our message has become broader in such a short time, it was necessary for us to make some big changes. What we really needed was a very simple and clean space that made it easier to deliver a number of messages. At the end of the day, the black background was cool, but just wasn't very inviting.

Over the past 6 months my focus has been more and more on the business side of owning and running a website. I have always seen it as essential to get to know the goals, strategies and business objectives that my clients have for their own websites at the start of a project. Certainly, most of the project planning meetings I can think of have always started with my digging around for information on where the marketing strategy is leading, what return is the client looking for? Design aesthetics and technologies can wait until I am sure I understand exactly what the website needs to do for visitors and the owner.

This is such an important part of what we do, that our own website needs to make it crystal clear. As web designers, it is always tempting to focus on the design and technologies that we get really excited about and not, when you really get down to it, what is of most importance to our clients - a website that works and returns the results that their original objectives laid out.

For that, websites should be built in the right way to encourage and not hinder their evolution. Website owners need to be provided with the tools that help them to understand how their website is performing. Are the objectives being met? Can small changes be made that will improve results? With the right tools, website owners can evolve their sites over time and be so much more involved.

In terms of our own website. Drupal has made it easy to change everything from design through to layout through to content - a great tool! What we are now working hard on is making sure that we ourselves are able to keep things moving forward. It is after all far easier to make smaller ongoing improvements, than it is to tackle sweeping changes because you have realised that your shoes are thoroughly worn out!