After several months of development (and occasional neglect as we tended to other work) we finally rolled out version three of our website this afternoon.

I'm calling this design Portholes, because the small images on the main pages are like windows on the more dramatic content pages.

We worked with Lisa Graboski on this one. Lisa is one of our favourite designers; her work is bold, thoughtful and immaculately clean. (To the extent that this design falls short of those descriptors, I have to take the blame since I oversaw the implementation.)

The first thing you'll notice is that every content page is anchored by a photo. One of our goals for Portholes was to show our projects and processes without necessarily showcasing (or showboating) them. So we wanted to use real photos that we'd taken and avoid the generic stock photos that make many websites look insincere and inauthentic.

As you'll see, we had to make a few compromises. (But only a few.)

Portholes also features a blog, which will combine our company announcements with opinions, essays, critiques and anything else we think is interesting. And we'll have comments, too. Eventually.

The whole site is managed through Movable Type with some PHP sprinkled in. Aside from being a bit clumsy when it comes to rebuilding, I'm impressed with MT's flexibility as a publishing engine. (Portholes' finest feature, I think, is the cruft-free URLs. They make my geeky heart glow.)

Lastly, we tell our clients that they should be continually improving their website to avoid that cycle of destructive creation. In that spirit we have a few tweaks we hope to roll out fairly soon: a better menu, links to related content from key pages, tags, and new photos.

Stay tuned.

Posted in Announcements on January 29, 2007

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