Waggener Edstrom Redesign
Dude, you guys. We did it. After some crazy late nights and weekends we finally launched the new WE.com!!
I had the amazing opportunity to be the lead designer on the redesign of our agency’s website. When I started back in June the site wasn’t really something I wanted to share with anyone (no offense to the previous designer) which bummed me out because the quality of talent and my general love for the company was something I wanted to shout from the mountain tops. See the old site.
Design Goals
Simplifying the nav. The first thing I did was break up the nav. It was 8 items long, which was hard to digest. I ended up organizing them by audience. Returning visitors who are staying up to date with us and new visitors who need to be educated on who we are and what we do. We also made the decision to go with a vertical subnav and ditch the horizontal from the old site which will allow for future growth.
Flexible homepage. I really wanted to make sure we had a place where we could share our story and promote our content. The previous site didn’t provide any flexibility in this area. Bubbling up the content and the stories we work so hard on was a must.
Consolidating all our content. I ended up building the whole thing on the ExpressionEngine 2.0 Beta which worked out really nice. I’ve started to fall in love with EE. It’s going to be nice to run all our content, news, press releases, etc. in one place and have the flexibility of the CodeIgniter framework at our disposal.
And more. There were a ton of additional improvements with overall aesthetic and content organization. We also re-developed the entire site to help reenforce standards and build a great foundation for future iterations.
Thanks & eProps
Our team totally rockz0rd this project, it was one of the best collaborations I’ve been involved with. David Carroll cleaned up shop as lead designer on the Studio D portion along with Erik Jung who busted out some hot jquery magic. Tyler Sticka, Elizabeth Miller and Alayna Vincent provided some awesome support across the entire site; content, QA, design and development. Oh and let’s not forget Dave, John, Kent, Shelley, Jen and a bunch of other sweet people that made this whole project possible. I love you guys.
