Super Ginormous

Tag: redesign

  • Personal Site Sprint

    It’s on. I’ve given myself a deadline of September 1 to launch a new cdharrison.com. And I won’t be alone. Greg Newman (@20seven) and Bryan Veloso (@bryanveloso) are going to participate as well. We’re calling it a Personal Site Sprint and we’re going to document the process as we go along.

  • Minor Tweaks

    I made some minor changes to the site this morning. Notably, the site is no longer 640px wide. I opted to increase the overall width to 960px so that I could add a sidebar. As I develop this iteration out further, the reason I added the sidebar will be more apparent. I have done no browser testing as of yet. I would be surprised if the site wasn’t broken, but don’t fret… change is coming. I appreciate your patience.

  • Sandboxing

    I finally took the plunge and switched over to using Sandbox for WordPress. I’m hoping to have some time over the coming weeks to apply my own design to it… for the time being, this one will work. Stay tuned.

  • Far From Done

    Well, the new site design is here… sort of. I’m still working on a lot of behind the scenes stuff… but I felt like where I am with everything is much better than where I was with the previous iteration of the site. So, without further adieu, here’s Effercio – version 14 of cdharrison.com. There’s still a lot more to do at this point…

    • Integrate hAtom and hCard support.
    • Fix paging glitch when browsing categories.
    • Search and Archives need to be improved… The paging glitch is effecting these as well.
    • Fix notifications.
    • Create alternate, high contrast stylesheet.
    • Fix rendering bugs…
    • And much more…

    It’s getting there though. Let me know if you encounter any problems while using the site.

  • We Have Liftoff: MAU.com

    MAU Screenshot

    Months of hard work have finally paid off – we launched the new MAU.com, just moments ago.

    The site was an awesome undertaking. We had to convert several years worth of static content, and reorganize it in a logical way. We worked closely with MAU staff to ensure everything worked the way the organization needed for it to work. All of us at PowerServe really appreciate having the opportunity to work with MAU on this project. We hope you’ll check it out.

    MAU, Inc. is one of the nation’s largest workforce solution providers. Based in Augusta with offices in Georgia, South Carolina and Illinois, MAU provides provides comprehensive and integrated workforce solutions for corporations and businesses.

    PowerServe worked with MAU, Inc.’s marketing team to redesign MAU’s site to showcase what sets MAU apart from their competition. The new design is clean, simple and flexible. It was designed to compliment existing marketing materials, as well as to give MAU a more refined look on the web.

    Our goals for this site were simple: make it easy to use; make it look more professional; make it more search engine friendly; make it more extensible.

    To make it easier to use, we conducted a site audit of the pre-existing website, and organized content into a more logical structure. This helped us to “trim the fat” and remove a lot of older content no longer being utilized or that was no longer relevant.

    To make it more professional, we developed a design that would compliment some of the print materials MAU had already been producing. We also wanted to design something that would compliment the MAU logo colors: blue and orange. We utilized SlideShowPro on a number of pages to give the site a more polished, dynamic feel.

    To make the site more search-engine friendly, we recoded the entire site from scratch, utilizing web standards, and semantically sound markup. The reduction in code also helped the site to load faster. It is now more compatible with all mainstream web browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Mozilla Firefox 1.5 (Mac/PC) and Apple Safari 2.0.

    To make the site more extensible, we utilized a new template structure to make it 1) easier to add new pages; 2) easier to manipulate the look and feel of all pages; and 3) easier to manage existing pages. Design changes take seconds versus the minutes and hours they once took.

    This redesign project was a huge undertaking, but the final product was more than worth it.

  • Changes Coming

    I thought my issues with Blogger were over. They aren’t. I’m still getting Broken Pipeline errors when I try to publish. I got no response from Blogger. I guess this is to be expected from such a big company… especially one offering free applications.

    After evaluating several blog applications, I have decided to make the switch over to MovableTypeWordPress. I’ll be working on migrating my existing content over to the new blog app in the coming weeks.

    Stay tuned…

  • New Look Coming Next Week for Basecamp

    Jason Fried posted a teaser screenshot of a new layout they’ll be rolling out for Basecamp in the Basecamp Forums. I’m liking it so far… This is also cool, because this marks the first time (that I can recall) where 37Signals made users aware of a change before they made it… Nice work guys!