Site Update Phase II: Behold, the Whitespace!
Posted by Rod Armstrong, April 14th, 2006
Last evening I launched what is Phase II of my grand Site Realignment Plan. It would fall into too-obvious territory for me simply to point this out (if you’ve seen our previous version from the past six months or so, you probably notice the difference), so I’ll try to give you a little behind-the-scenes thinking of the methodology that went into this iteration.
Phase I consisted of redoing the top level of navigation so it was simpler and done in bulletproof CSS tabs. The response from this was so positive, I wanted to take the idea further with Phase II.
I had a main goal of introducing more white space into the design, freeing the pages, increasing readability, and making our layout easier on the eyes. I felt the previous Blue Design, while bright and colorful, made each page a little too claustrophobic. After much trial and error, I eventually happened upon a color scheme I liked enough (the dark gray/black with the primary colors) for the new header. It also took some visual experimenting to make sure it complemented a full screen of white space appropriately. So what you see there now is what turned out to work the best for those goals, in my opinion.
Some other changes of note aren’t purely visual. This design marks what I would say is a more “mature” departure from previous designs. I think we’ve matured as a web host a great deal over the past year or so, and I decided to the risk of attempting to show that through our website.
For instance, we no longer have an “ORDER NOW” smiling-stock-photo-person-graphic taking up the majority of our index. I’ve replaced it with a more subtle graphic that hopefully conveys the new tone we’re looking for. Now, I’m not going to immediately, self-righteously, knock this practice. For one, it actually seems to work in most contexts. It’s an older article of conventional internet wisdom that smiling humans can lead to more frequent orders, and we can’t exactly argue with that. It’s a tool that did always have some varying degree of success for us in encouraging orders.
The problem now is just that we are becoming more unique as a web host and as a company, and that’s what we wanted to show. It might sound cliché, but it often is really hard to follow your gut as a person or as a company and not try to emulate the trends and the status-quo that have proven historically successful. I want to cut down on possible sappiness and buzzword-acity (-aciousness?) here, so I think you get the idea.
Since there has not been a huge outcry (yet) regarding the removal of our smiling person on the index, our bright pastel blue aquarium of a background, our candy-coated accents, etc., I will assume that this move has at least not been a major misstep. It’s my feeling that easy-to-navigate, readable sites are really the first priority for most people. Having that down right (and I’m hard at work on more improvements) can probably say volumes more than a smiling homepage model can.
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