After using the same design for 5 years, we’ve finally got round to redesigning our website. The old site served us very well, generated a nice steady stream of traffic through organic listings on Google and was well liked; but it was beginning to show it’s age. The underlying HTML changed over the years from table based HTML 4.0.1, to XHTML with some fairly hacky JavaScript pull-down menus, a finally to XHTML-Strict and JQuery for all the client-side functionality. All this change was behind the scenes, with very little of the site content or visual appearance was updated.
After debating creating a custom CMS in Zend Framework, we finally decided to do the whole thing in WordPress, building a custom theme from scratch. As with all CMS type systems, the real pain was in coming up with a navigation system that was reasonably flexible without looking too generic. We also waited months for WordPress 3 to be released – as it included a number of new features, such as Custom Post Types, that were going to be useful to us.
We’ve used a fair sprinkling of cutting edge technology in creating the front end for the site, but it’s all implemented using the ‘Progressive Enhancement‘ methodology, so it should look acceptable in most browsers and be accessible for all. I’m sure there are a few things left to tweak, but part of the joy of doing your own site is that you can keep fiddling with it until it feels right…
Most of the new content is about the web design and development services we provide, so it’ll be interesting to see how quickly we start to appear in Google for our chosen keywords and keyphrases. Over the coming months we’ll be checking our Google Analytics results and massaging the copy to better hit our Search Engine Optimisation goals…
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