tenderblenderfd.com
Last week, I made some changes to our company’s website. The splash page wasn’t as inviting, some pages took forever to load, and a few other things. I few tweaks here and there, and I’m happy with the result! Mind you, I close to suck at coding (I only learned to code on my own thanks to Tumblr), so nothing fancy here. Took several tries to get some things right, but here we go!
The first thing I did was to change the pink color we use as accent. Since I had redone our logo as well, I decided it was only right to make the colors on the website fit with our new colors, as well. Still pink, but a more striking shade that looked nice next to the photos!
Also made use of Adobe Typekit so I could use Museo (one of my favorite fonts!) for our website! I was always bothered by the fonts I used before—nothing from the Google web fonts seemed to do the trick. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to use Typekit! Now we have fonts on our website to match our logo. What is this OC-ness.
The home page was lacking the “mmmm” factor (since we are, after all, all about food), so I figured to forgo the big white space and small photo in the center and just have one huge photo on the entire screen. I actually worked on this page while enjoying that affogato pictured in our new home page, hahaha.
Kiks helped me out a bit by “art directing”. I had actually initially put a photo with a camera, which he said looked more like a Canon ad (even though the logo was nowhere there, LOL) than what we actually do in our company. It made sense, plus the photo was too dark and clashed with our general style, which is light and lovely to look at, haha.
I also felt we needed our new logo in here somewhere. The About page seemed to be the perfect place for it. I’m still debating on putting a tiny version of it above the disclaimers at the bottom of the page, but I’ll save that for another time.
I really need to update those photos of us, though. Those were taken waaaay back in...2010? 2011? When our company was still fairly new. Maybe when Kiks comes home from the States!
Our main pages, Photography and Design, function as our online portfolio, so it was imperative that they look and work great. I’ve been having issued with it loading too slowly due to the layout I used before (images were in columns which used isotopes to allow them to adjust depending on the window width, but I won’t bore you with technicalities), which just was unacceptable.
So goodbye, grid. Just went for the usual single column. I think it looks much better, and viewers can focus on the photo shown on the screen rather than be bombarded with a zillion photos at once. While it is fun to look at tons of pretty food photos on a screen, I made the call to dial it down.
Yay! I’m much happier with our company website now. I’m still thinking if I should redo the blog as well, but I kind of like that it’s a little different. I’ll let that idea simmer for a while, I suppose.