This is the first part in a series of posts documenting the redesign of our company website – http://www.outrageouscreations.com during december 2009.

We decided around the middle of December that it was time to give our company site some attention, as is often the case, our own site is always the last to get time spent on it and as a result by December 2009 it was seriously out of date with none of our recent projects being featured and the last news item was about the site receiving a new look in November 2008!.

We didn’t want this redesign to just be a quick band-aid – a new visual look stuck on top of the existing content, so we started to plan out what we wanted to achieve with the new site.

1. A clean, modern visual look and feel was essential.
2. An enhanced user experience with greater usability.
3. Build the site using our CSS framework to enable rapid prototyping and development
4. Provide existing and potential clients with better and easier to understand information.
5. Incorporate a new blog system to provide a behind the scenes look at what we do.
6. Integrate with social media to give people more opportunites to connect with us.

With these goals in mind, we set out to come up with the initial creative design for the site and started planning out the various sections and pages that we wanted to incorporate.  After playing around with the concept and colours for a while, we ended up with a very clean and light design that we just knew was perfect for our needs.

The final design

When creating the concept and coming up with the home page layout, we decided that a grid based layout would suit our needs best, enabling us to bring a variety of content right to the front and provide site visitors with quick access to all areas of the site.

The page area is split into three zones, the masthead, main content area and footer, each with their own purpose.

The masthead contains the following :

• Branding
• Brief welcome message
• Tabs to share the page via email,  bookmark our RSS feed and share the page on social networking/bookmarking sites.
• The main menu.

Within the main content area, we created zones for the following :

• Featured content slider to bring high visibility to a selection of projects
• Out most recent news headlines
• Easy and visual access to several main sections of the site including online quotes.

In the footer we wanted to give easy access to :

• Our social networking activities and blog
• Links to a hand picked selection of featured sites
• And of course, our selection of  quotes – a staple on the site since 2002