Crazy Bat Designs - Helping you reach the most people possible.

Written by Marco Battilana. CEO, Crazy Bat Designs.
Email: info@crazybat.ca
Web:www.crazybat.ca

I've had the same design since May 2004. I've felt no need to change this as I thought that the message I was communicating was effective enough. However, much like staring at the same walls in a room, I felt that a change was needed. So, I set out to redesign my site from the ground up.

To start with my redesign process, I broke down the site in the following aspects:

• Corporate Identity
• Information Architecture (IA)
• General Look and Feel (Including Layout and Content)

For the final part of "Anatomy of a redesign", I'll discuss my thoughts on how I came up with the General Look and Feel for this site. (Which will include the layout and the content within the site.)

Look and Feel

My previous design used a combination of blue, grey and white and some basic geometric shapes. My new designs remains mostly true to this same colour scheme. The shade of blue that I now use has been changed to reflect a slightly more vibrant colour. As well, I added a darker shade of grey for improved contrast.

As for the shapes, some of the original blue squares with the blue border remain, but I've attempted to give the site a more modern look by adding more rounded corners, gradients and more complex shapes.

I've also changed the typography from strictly Arial to a Trebuchet / Arial combination.

Layout

I decided to switch from a fluid layout to a fixed layout, to incorporate the new design elements.

The banner has been completely changed to encompass the new logo, as well as the new site navigation, skip links and search mechanism.

The navigation has been changed from vertical to horizontal as I wanted to bring more focus to the main content and subcontent areas.

The subcontent, or the areas that had the supplemental "Did You Know" facts, were dated and stale. Hence, I removed these section on all of the pages in favour of highlighting more timely information such as current projects, and links to colleague's sites and/or blogs.

The footer now contains affiliate links, RSS feeds and any promotions that I want to highlight.

Content

I've run through the current content of the site and have made a few changes here and there. Overall, most of the content remains as it is today as it's been through the most maintenance.

As the focus of this business continues to evolve, it will be important to assure that the message to the customer is communication as such. Hence, I'll update the appropriate content as it becomes necessary. For now though, it's all good.

In conclusion

This concludes the anatomy of the redesign of Crazy Bat Designs. The total time it took to complete was about 1 month. This was to come up with all of the elements described in this series:

• Corporate Identity - 2 weeks
• Information Architecture (IA) - 1 week
• General Look and Feel
  • Layout - 1 week
  • Content - No change

An important lesson learned is that with proper planning and budgeting of time, you can also come up with a successful redesign.

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