It’s been a good twelve months since the MWP website had a make-over; and although it’s still wearing the same WordPress undies (rinsed out in the sink though – what do you take us for?) there’s an all new look and feel to celebrate my first successful year as a freelancer.

Things have been gone well this year even if I do say so myself, I’ve worked on over twenty projects. Websites for the pharmaceutical, healthcare, media and tourism industries as well as a number of touch-screen multimedia installations at various Museums and Visitor Centres up and down the country.

I suppose it’s been an odd year to start a business, what with t’old credit crunch and all that malarkey. Not that it’s seemed to effect us too much to be honest – it seems like our backgrounds, portfolios and contacts have stood us in good stead. Our clients have been reporting being pleasantly surprised when receiving our costs, certainly when compared to quotes received from other agencies. The fact that we’re small, agile and have little or no overheads except a world-class web host so that we can pass these savings on to our clients seems to be a concept that’s worked very well indeed. We’ve delivered some big projects, at a cost most agencies wouldn’t get out of bed for. Not only that, but we’ve done very nicely for ourselves and enjoyed the summer sun too. Result!

So what’s with the big long page dude?

Experimentation really; browsing the traffic stats for madewithpixels has always caused some worry, Seemingly suffering from an exceptionally high bounce rate, I wanted to do something to make the content more focussed, accessible and inviting to read.

Admittedly; there was an awful lot of content on the old site. Lots of words and explanations that clearly no-one was reading. So the design rationale slowly became; why make people navigate at all? There’s not that much to see other than a few pics and a bit of blurb about our approach -Spreading the site out over tens of pages simply makes the user expend so much more effort: Click > Read > Decide > Click > Read etc.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see to find out whether it was a good decision or not – I’m mindful about the effect on SEO as the page is now well over 1500 lines of HTML when rendered and with 50 or so embedded images it does take a little while to load. Suffice to say I’ll be keeping my eyes on those stats especially as Google has announced that page load times are to affect page ranks results in its ‘quality score algorithm’.

So I hope you enjoy the new garb. And I’m pleased to report that for once, I’m actually one hundred percent happy with the result! Never an easy thing to achieve when designing your own site somewhat strangely.

It’s all about the grid baby

The eagle eyed designers among you may spot how lovely and tight the grid and vertical rhythm of the typography is.

I hope, at some point in the not too distant future to publish a post I’ve been working on for a while. There are LOTS of great articles out there on grid based layout, but very few with any real practical examples or design rationale from the designers responsible – I’m lucky to have been taught the skill at college in the late eighties but it’s a skill that seems to have slipped past most educators radars since then so I thought I’d dissect a few of my designs and post the results. Watch this space!

And I’d just like to thank…

As always, the most excellent Jon Ward (dude, get that site built… I know you’re busy but I’m sick of not linking to you) for the totally bodacious custom lightbox and smooth as a babies bum javascript page-scrolling sorcery. Without his continued help and downright genius; my designs would remain somewhat static.