Website Design Blog. Evoart

On my last day at Giant Peach I launched Revive Vending’s re-designed website! I thought I would write this post as something to remember the blood, sweat and tears that were put into the website by, and also the fact that everyone involved was pretty chuffed with the finished website when it finally saw the light of day! This new site came about for a few reasons, but mainly due to an old table based layout.

It took some doing to persuade the powers that be at Revive to splash out the cash and get us (Giant Peach) to redesign their site. But after preaching the advantages of CSS endlessly, and dropping some hints, I was eventually able to start mocking up a design in Photoshop.

Why a re-design?

The main reasons for the redesign of the Revive Vending website was the fact that it used a table based design. The site had tables nested inside tables, you name it, it had it, and one of the crucial main aims of the new site was to rank highly on Google for vending specific search phrases, which you might be surprised to know are quite competative! We knew that we could easily achieve much higher rankings for Revive with a CSS based layout.

The second reason was that the site was looking dated. The old Revive site was about the fourth ever layout I designed and built when I started way back in October 2005 at Giant Peach, and I knew that this time around I could do a much better job. As with many sites, over the months and years its aims and even content had drastically changed, almost as if it was trying to evolve into something completely different. Everything possible had been crammed in and as a result wasn’t in keeping with the original design.

Starting the re-design…

When I was with Giant Peach we worked inside the Revive offices, and that meant it was so easy to have meetings and put a lot of thought and energy into the new website. Thats something that with most projects you just can’t achieve. Obviously there we’re some downsides to this also! The general navigation on the site was to remain pretty much untouched, except for the addition of a blog, and in the coming months an online shop. However the look of the homepage was to take on a new direction.

The Homepage

Revive are a company with lots going on and lots of information to get across to their visitors and potential clients. I decided the best way to communicate this in the design of the site was to have the six main areas of their company easily accessible from the homepage, rather than hiding these areas away in sub navigation, or inside other pages. I did this by clearly featuring each area in a panel on the homepage. Design wise I wanted to make these panels stand out and bring them right off the page. I did this by giving the panel areas a slight shadow and a subtle gradient.

Typography

I think with this site I did quite a good job with the live text typography. If you didn’t know, thats the type thats actual ‘live text’ and not a graphic. Working on this site design even inspired me to write ‘How to use fonts effectively on the web‘ and one of my personal aims before beginning the design was to make the most out of the typography I used. I took advantage of the freedom CSS gives us and used background colours, letter spacing and much more.

The Overall Look & Feel

As I mentioned before, the look and feel needed bringing right up to date. The strip of bubbles across the top of the site was put in place to reinforce the Revive brand, as its included in their logo, on their vans and also on their vending machines. The white strap inside the bubbles at the top right was added to help with optimisation. Its live text and also a header tag. Its easily customisable on each page of the site, and can therefore be tailored towards the specific search phrases targeted on each page.

In conclusion

Im pretty happy with the finished website, but even after a couple of weeks of the site going live, there are a couple of things (probably coding wise) I would have done differently. Oh well, I guess thats the nature of web designing. Your always learning something new and improving on your skills.