New Website
11 August 2009Here at Relatively Early Development, we’ve been hard at work for the last couple of days and are pleased to present our new site. To show you how far the design has come, here is a preliminary sketch we did on our whiteboard:
The logo is as large as we felt we could make it in order to build our brand. We have a block of ads (including an auto-playing video) in the middle to increase our revenue stream. Next to the ads is our blog, because blogs are important for building a relationship with our clients. We had to sacrifice a bit on width to make room for ads, but we felt it was a good compromise. At the bottom, in order to keep our visitors entertained, we embedded an episode of Lost from Hulu and some background music. There is a video of one of us at the bottom of the right telling the visitor what kind of opportunities we offer. Above that is a link to our twitter and facebook pages (coming soon). Along the right margin is a stream of twitter updates about us.
When fleshed out, this version of the site didn’t work as well as we would have liked. The first thing to go was anything that moved or made sound when the page was loaded. Next, we took out the ads to make room for the blog. Then we removed the social networking features. We don’t have time for that kind of thing.
Now that the page was stripped of everything but the blog, we started adding in other important features, like a portfolio. We felt that it was important for potential clients to be able to see the kind of work we do.
In all seriousness
We took this opportunity to try out a few technologies that were new to us. This website is built using Jekyll and is pushed up to our GitHub Pages repo. Our branding is the handy work of A. Micah Smith, a.k.a My Associate Cornelius. The preferred font for headlines is Rockwell. Those who have Rockwell installed will be greeted with its wonderful slabby goodness. For those who do not and are using a browser that supports the CSS3 @font-face rule, we’re using Kernest to embed the somewhat similar Chunk typeface. Browsers without @font-face support get Courier. I’m sorry. The portfolio tickers use jQuery Tools Scrollable.
To celebrate the launch of the new website, we’ve made it open source.
