We are going to start blogging about our process a little more to start showing our potential clients what our process looks like and how we work internally. Here's what we are thinking. We are going to blog bi-weekly about our progress on our brand new website, which I have been working on for about 2 weeks. The process of designing our new site should take us to about January, which is our target for deployment.

 

The Basics

The basic idea of the new site is to incorporate a new and improved design, cool functionality, an integrated blog, and clean coding techniques. Although you won't be able to see under-the-covers at our code, our site will be entirely dependent on a custom-built CMS (Content Management System) we are building just for this site, which will address some of our specific needs and tastes.

 

SEO???

Yes, it's true. We will incorporate some "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization for those following along at home) techniques. The techniques we are going to use are clean URLs (ex: http://eagleenvision.net/about), keyword targeting, and clean XHTML markup. These technically aren't "SEO-only" techniques... but it's our form of SEO :) So maybe we shouldn't call it SEO...

 

How will this affect me?

Well, hopefully it doesn't affect you. We do hope, however, that you will find our new site easier to use, nicer to look at, and something you might sit down and read in your spare time. A great web designer has to have an amazing website, right?

 

What do you have so far?

Since we just started, we don't have much. What I can tell you what we have currently is this:

  • Our CMS text editing
  • Sitemap (For search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live, etc.)
  • jQuery (THIS is going to give the site an amazing feel with Ajax and JavaScript effects. I WILL be detailing jQuery in this blog series)
  • Clean URLs (No more .aspx on our pages. AKA "Extensionless URLs")
  • Caching - We are going to decrease load times on our site by at least 200%. I'm sure you will notice the difference.
  • A few Ajax methods ("Contact us" is currently the only one so far)

 

So we haven't done a thing with design so far. Right now our focus is functionality. We need to get our functionality down and THEN design our site. The coding work is what takes the time and the testing. But I think both will make a difference as we continually push the envelope for web design excellence.

 

What's wrong with the one you've got?

The look and feel of our website is nice, and it flows. I think we are VERY proud of our site at the moment. What we want to do is make it better, cleaner, and cooler. We also think that a web designer should consider redoing their site or doing something to their site every year. Who wants to look at an old design when they can have something cool and fresh? Our year is up :)

We also want cleaner markup. Right now, our XHTML markup is by no means clean. We have inline styles everywhere and it just isn't our style anymore. (I blame that on the HTML Editor we were using [cough... FreeTextBox... cough]. Glad we don't use them anymore! Thank you FCKEditor!!!)

We also want to be the coolest web designer "on the block". Our new website design and functionality with showcase our company as an innovator and not as a stagnant company.

 

Check back around Thanksgiving. We will make another post during that week!