April, 2007

Fragrant lilacs droop on the rims of their jars of water, Kandace's muddy gardening sandals await her bare feet on the back porch, and homemade gardenburgers top the Needmore Lunch of Choice list. It must be April, making its way to May. Jodi and Ray got a little older this month, a wedding is on the horizon and life is, as always, just peachy here at the Needmore studio. We're growing, creating more beautiful websites, and feeling pretty all right.

Brian Ford on Board!

Let us be the first to introduce you to Brian Ford, Needmore's Ruby on Rails programmer extraordinaire! We're thrilled, delighted, tickled, and in general, a-gush about having Brian as part of our team: he brings tons of experience, brilliant ideas, great fashion sense and the cutest lunchbox ever. We're knee deep in awesome Rails projects here at Needmore these days and Brian is already busy working his magic.

Adding Brian to the team is allowing us to offer much more to our clients. There was a time when e-commerce was a dirty word around the office. After all, we are known for our work with creative minds... Why ever would we dirty ourselves with the messy business of money-changing? Well, as it turns out, e-commerce is an area of web design even more desperately in need of good design. And as we grow up as a business, and add good folks like Brian, we're able to design more than just a great website. We're able to help bring our clients closer to their customers, and hopefully make them more money in the process.

Another thing we love is giving back to the community that has helped us get to where we are now. In the past, we've helped out the Portland Web Innovators, the Rails Documentation Project, and many others. Brian shares this interest with us, and as a contributor to important open-source projects like Rubinius, we're pleased to say that he'll be spending one day a week here working on projects like Rubinius. We also hope to be able to share some of the code that we're cooking up for our own projects with other Ruby on Rails programmers. Stay tuned for more delicious dishes from Needmore!

Redesign is All Around Us

This month's theme seemed to be redesigns of websites that were already pretty darned cool. Let's talk about how we made them even better.

Kendra Binney

Kendra Binney came to us with an exciting redesign wish-list: a more creative, professional, and easy to update site that showcased the beautiful, resonant and unsettling paintings in her portfolio. She also had a desire for a small online store that complimented the portfolio emphasis of her site with simplicity.

We began the redesign by thinking about what worked well and not-so-well at her original site. We liked that the original site used elements of her art and lettering, but we wanted to create a site that would place Kendra's individual pieces at the center, as the heart and soul of the site, instead of as an element of the design.

To this end, we chose a muted color palette, used Kendra's hand-lettering for the site's navigation and selected intriguing textures and elements of her paintings for the site's background. With these elements in place, we concentrated on highlighting large, vibrant images of Kendra's work (for example, placing a random slideshow right on her home page) and let the art speak for itself.

Because sites must be alive to bring people back, we made sure that Kendra's entire site was a snap for her to update, both in terms of images and text. And now she also has a lovely newsletter, so be sure to sign up to see what Kendra has in store for us!

Amy Tavern

Redesigns aren't always only about a new look; they're just as often about new functionality. For Amy's site redesign, we focused on modernizing both her external look, as well as the behind-the-scenes code.

We were working toward:

• A simplified, more colorful look - we added a splash of turquoise to Amy's site and a reorganized the layout of her work.
• More areas to easily update - We moved Amy's entire site to Ladybug. This means that any text or images on the site becomes updateable by Amy. We also added lots of little announcement areas to the site, so that Amy can let people know about sales, specials and events.
• Cleaning up behind the scenes - We had some pretty strong ideas code-wise about improving the nuts and bolts of Amy's site, most of which don't make the site all that much different visually. We moved the site to using a unified navigation (as an include for easy updating) and, through the use of CSS, stripped a bunch of superfluous code. The code is leaner, easier to understand and easier to update. It's also much more search engine friendly!

In Conclusion...

We always like to highlight a few things we've written in our blog, in case you haven't been following along. We've been so busy that we haven't really been able to write as much as we'd like to, but there are a few gems in there.

• A New Wagon - Ray sums it up with a good quote he overheard: "You don't have to reinvent the wheel, just attach it to a new wagon."
• Walking Meetings - Kandace likes our new style of meetings... getting out and walking around! They work better than you might suspect, and they're healthy too!
• Client Surveys: Now 80% Less Painful! - Jodi sums up some lessons learned from redesigning our Client Survey.

As always, thanks for being there, thanks for listenting and we'll be in touch again soon. Now, go enjoy that lovely day!

All the best,
Team Needmore