Most of our website design projects involve a first design for a new site or web application, or a complete redesign from the ground up. A home page and design “refresh”, however, can be a smart, often overlooked investment in a site’s vibrancy, particularly in times when budgets are tight and that vision of a redesign might be out of reach.
Of course, not all sites are suited to an evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) face lift. Putting lipstick on that 10 year old site with the scrolling marquee, blocky graphics, and green background is probably not a smart investment. But there are many websites with reasonable aesthetics – maybe a few years old – that don’t need to be torn down and rebuilt. Some creative thinking about how existing structural elements can be refined, coupled with a face lift of the home page’s content and, perhaps, key landing pages, can offer real bang for the buck.
Recently, we did just that for the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO).
Continue reading Home page face lift for NELLCO
The Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship’s blog has been featured on the WordPress Showcase. The blog, featuring three distinct “columns” (in the content, not design sense of the word), engages is its readers with ideas and opinions on corporate citizenship.
We think this implementation’s most interesting features are under the hood. The blog needed to be integrated with BCCCC’s primary content management system – CitySoft CE. We developed a WordPress template that automatically pulls and caches the top navigation (drop downs and all) from its CitySoft counterpart.
On the CitySoft side, we developed a home page template that pulls the recent items (the Director’s Blog, and general news) from WordPress. The CitySoft template loads a cached version of the entire home page that refreshes ever hour, resulting in a “zippy” home page despite the number of complex elements, not to mention the site’s traffic. Most visitors never know they are switching between two completely different systems!
Continue reading “Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship” blog featured on WordPress Showcase
