Our Website Redesign Q&A
Our new website design is officially up and running!
Months in the making, this new website relied upon all of our talents here at Get Online NOLA. Brainstorming sessions, weeks designing, writing, and coding were all worth it for this state of the art site. Want to learn a little more about how it was done? Take a read through the Q&A Below.
Wendy Dolan, President:
When did you decide we needed a new website design?
Wendy Dolan (WD): “Over the past several years, we’ve been providing more digital marketing services to complement our web design services, and we knew our website needed to be updated to reflect that. We are always working to improve our own online presence, but of course, our clients come first, so this site has been a long time coming.”
When did you create the old website?
WD: “The previous website was the first one Get Online NOLA put online, so it launched in 2013, but we made a lot of upgrades over the years.”
What was the first step you took when conceptualizing the new website?
WD: “Luckily, we have a pretty well-developed strategy process that we use with clients, so we applied it to our own brand. First, we did an industry analysis, then we created marketing personas and messaging guides, and a sitemap to create user flow and conversions.”
How did you come up with the video game theme?
WD: “That came out of a big team-wide brainstorming session. Honestly, it’s hard to remember who said it first because we were all bouncing ideas off of each other. The ideas were that most businesses want to take things to the “next level” and a strong marketing strategy can help them get there.”
Lindsey Bock, Graphic Designer:
So, Lindsey, how long did designing this new website take you?
Lindsey Bock (LB): “Like 30-40 hours. This was definitely the most work I’ve put into any website to date. We started with the homepage design and custom illustration. There were a few versions of the homepage that I presented to the team, and then homepage revisions. Then I designed each individual back page, plus illustrations and revisions.”
We love all the work you put into the graphics on the home page, and our services pages! What is your favorite part?
LB: “I love that we have custom illustrations and that Leo brought the homepage illustration to life by animating them! If you haven’t noticed yet, the top of the homepage is interactive. I also love the use of gradients, they’re a big design trend this year. The custom “our work” pages were so much fun to design. Also, the whole video game theme throughout was exciting to work with.”
How do you even start a big project like this?
LB: “It took a lot of brainstorming with the whole team to come up with the homepage illustration and custom illustrations throughout the site. I also did a lot of experimenting with color. Once we got our general color palette and theme down, it was a little easier to make the rest of the website cohesive. The homepage was definitely the hardest part.”
Where does this project rank in your top ten?
LB: “This is one of my favorite projects since starting at Get Online NOLA. I loved seeing the website go from start to finish, and I love that every single person on the team pitched in to complete it. Love seeing everyone’s hard work come to life!”
Leo Skovron, Web Developer:
Hey, Leo! How long did coding this whole new website take you?
LS: “This was a big, ambitious project, and programming took about a month, totaling around 60 hours of work.”
What was the first step you took while designing our new website?
LS: “It’s important to have a clear and complete understanding of a site’s functionality before beginning to build. This initial step was an exciting challenge, addressing the specific needs of the website by offering maximum flexibility and customizability without cluttering the WordPress dashboard (the interface for editing the site). In the case of this site, I chose to create a relatively complex framework in the most uncomplicated and intuitive way.”
We have a lot of different content on the site, how did you keep everything organized?
LS: “To incorporate all of the different content types, I created several custom post types, allowing us to organize our content into isolated areas on the dashboard (for example team members, portfolio items). These custom posts types were further categorized to allow for sorting within a given content type.”
This whole site is custom, how did you build out all the different pages?
LS: “In order to provide maximum customizability, I created a ‘page builder’. As an alternative to a handful of ready-made page templates, the page builder allows a page admin to create custom page layouts by stacking vertical sections. A good example of the page builder in action is the Web Design page.”
What was your favorite part of this build?
LS: “A fun challenge on this build was setting up all of the bells and whistles. This includes all of the moving elements on a given page. Getting each page element to move or respond to the user in the intended manner was a process of trial and error, writing Javascript (a powerful programming language) snippets and modifying them until I found the right recipe. The home page was particularly fun to play around with, and Lindsey provided a really creative vision for how the interactive elements should work.”
Building state of the art websites is our jam! Interested in leveling up your digital presence? Let’s schedule a strategy session today.