It has been a busy couple of months here in the Found Studio. Myself, Luke, Dean, & David have been working our socks off creating a new site for Found. We went out and researched our industry’s best websites, new techniques & technologies and have been designing, coding, wordpress building, copyrighting for some time. And I can now proudly say we have an awesome new site!
Considering we only launched the first Found website when we rebranded just over a year ago, why did we decide to re-design the entire site & build from scratch?
The original Found site was designed & built as a one page site, which was cool & interesting at the time. It did what it needed but as Found grew we needed more pages added, more content and we were offering more services, which all needed to be added to the site. We had a major problem, it was a one page site, how do we expand this out? Well we couldn’t really! We added a few extra pages behind the site that could be reached but it’s not the same.
We had been posting about great advice, ideas, articles, but we weren’t getting much coverage, not many people knowing it was there, so we really needed to push the social side of our website. We have great people working here at Found and everyone has great ideas, advice, knowledge and we wanted to share this with the world!
The web industry is constantly changing – as a company we should be keeping up with these changes, whether it’s a new technology, new framework or new design technique. Our original site was looking a little dated, even in just a year, so it was time to go back to the drawing board and start again!
New Found Website
Old Found Website
So what have we done?
This time round we have a built a site that can be expanded. The entire site was created in WordPress, so every single page & post can be updated easily and quickly by anyone in the team. This has made the studio team very happy – we do love a bit of WordPress.
All of the articles, advice, ideas we have been posting have got bigger, better with the added bonus of social media integration. So now you can like, tweet, google+ to your heart’s content.
There’s now so many pages in our site, so much to know about us and what we do – you can now see what that is. Pages for each service we offer, technologies we use, case studies about the companies we work for and what they think about us. You can meet the team with each member of Found having their own page, with information about them and their posts.
We have used some new technologies to really show what we can do with the sites we create – for example, the site is now mobile/tablet friendly. We considered the devices when we designed the site, so the site is viewable on these devices as well as your desktop computer. The tiled look on the blog section, especially, was designed with mobile devices in mind – long lists of posts just don’t work well, as we found with the previous site.
As Found grew the Found brand needed to grow with that, so this is exactly what we have done. This time last week when you thought Found you thought purple, well now I can say we aren’t purple anymore, well, not as purple. The site isn’t all purple anymore and our Found color palette has changed – purple & pink, please say hello to blue & green! Purple & pink are still Found’s main colours but we can now mix it up a little with the blue & green tones. The Found font used on the previous site was ‘Gotham Bold’. While this was great at the time, we needed something cleaner and less bulky and easier to read in certain browsers. So I would like to introduce you to a new Found font, ‘Copse’ – It’s a Google web font, so it’s great for the website.
We wanted to go with with something a lot cleaner this time in the overall look of the site, using the golden ratio to perfectly align our website. We made the decision early on to make the site a lot less purple and give it more white space. We also used big images to bring more interest to pages and to add some colour in to the pages. Square-looking sites get boring sometimes, so we thought we would shake the site up a bit by introducing diagonal shaping, just because it looks pretty damn cool!
We also used some new technologies on the website, things we haven’t really used that much before. HTML5 was used in our WordPress theme – it works perfectly in all browsers, with a script to make it work in older browsers. CSS3 is used a lot on the site – with the use of SVG’s, multiple backgrounds, text-shadow and border-radius – and is supported in all the modern browsers, then degrades gracefully for older browsers. We have used some cool new techniques like the Parallax scrolling on the homepage & headers of all pages and j-query and JavaScript for certain functions on the site. As IE6 is finally dying we decided that we would not support this browser on the Found website.
Summary
The Found site has taken a massive transformation over the last 3 months! A total re-design, expanding the Found brand, new technologies and techniques used plus more social integration. We, as a team, have also grown massively through working on such a huge project – we have learned so much and will be using all of these new techniques and technologies on future projects.
Now we just want to know what you think?
If you have any feedback or comments on our site, then we’d love to hear them!
