The new site is here!
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But obviously, you know this is the new site since your looking at it. Here are my thoughts/intentions with the new Headspace website:
From the front-end, I tried to make this design feel a little bigger and richer, and to display the content in a way thats easier to scan. I also wanted to make it more white, instead of the all black. This is purely a legibility concern. I want the website to be used for discussion and reading the blog posts, so I tried to find a solution that would be the easiest to read for long periods of time.
I’ve also abandoned the Flash gallery in favor of Javascript. The big difference for those without much technical knowledge is that with javascript, your merely manipulating traditional web content (HTML). With Flash, all the web page sees is a block of Flash code, without knowing any of the content it contains. Also, if you turn off style sheets in your browser, the images are still visible in an unordered list.
From a technical end, this new site is built with ExpressionEngine, a licensed content management system from Ellis Labs. It’s become my CMS of choice that I use on all client sites. It is flexible and easy to use, yet also extremely powerful and can perform advanced functionality with very little database/scripting ability. Now all of the site content is database driven, whereas in the old website, it was just the blog that was dynamic.
There are now RSS feeds for the blog and project gallery, so you can check for updates without visiting the site. I now have a request a quote form, which should make it simple to email detailed project requests. The blog is now easier to comment on, since you don’t need to register an account. I really hope that more people comment on the blogs, since it’s quick and easy!
You’ll also notice that I have some new projects, including the new Empire Theatres website (update, I was forced to take it off the site until it’s live, oops). This was something I art-directed and designed over at Modern Media. The development team over there is still hard at work making it happen, but sometime this spring, it should be live, and will be a great improvement over the current Empire website.
Okay, now on to the problems with this site. You may notice a few things aren’t working great - yet. The blog posts were ported over from the old site, so some of the formatting of special characters got messed up. I’ll be going through with a fine tooth comb and fixing those. Also the search form isn’t working so hot yet. I haven’t extensively tested the site in Internet Explorer yet, so please let me know if something is wacky.
I look forward to hearing your opinions of the new Headspace website. For my email newsletter subscribers, an announcement will be going out shortly once the site is fixed up.
By Steven Hambleton
on May 26th, 2008
Well done on the redesign and the well written blog posts so far.
PS. Not to sound too anal but it should be written as ExpressionEngine with no space and EllisLab has no ‘s’ at the end!
By Kyle Racki
on June 01st, 2008
Changed! Thanks for pointing it out.