It’s finally here!
After four years with our last website, we decided to set aside some time late last year to begin rethinking our website. Though we did want to update the look of our website, our primary concerns were about usability and user experience. Would it make sense for the user to land on a homepage that featured our client work? What was the best way to showcase our work, our team, and our contact information? Our old site was always content-rich, showcasing our digital work, our office life and more. Here are a few key choices that we made in this redesign:
Our homepage begins with a brief message about Barrel.
After some thought, we decided that the first and most useful piece of information we could give to a visitor on our site was a short introduction to Barrel. Disagree with us if you will, but this decision becomes exceedingly important as our site scales down for mobile. People need to know what they’re looking at!
On that note, we also made some specific modifications for mobile.
We’re a mobile generation. With iPads, iPad minis, smartphones, it’s hard for a site not to be responsive. To simplify the experience for the mobile user, we went through many iterations to figure out how to streamline the mobile experience without making it too different from the web experience. You’ll find that for most of our informational pages, such as About, Our History, etc. we’ve removed the header image, to allow the user quicker access to the content. In the slide menu, we’ve also included our important contact information right off the bat, so the user doesn’t even have to click into contact to find our address or telephone number.
We have a dropdown.
Digging through our previous site we realized we had so much content that users could only find by clicking on the Explore Boxes at the bottom of each page. We’re now making things easier by having an About dropdown that links to many of the pages that feature our work life.
It was time for WordPress.
We finally moved off ExpressionEngine (which is not to say we don’t love it!), but we wanted to reinvent our blogging process. Our previous blog was on Posterous and sadly, like Google Reader, is saying farewell to all its users this year. WordPress seemed like the obvious choice, given that we’d probably end up having our blog on it.
And now we’re showing off our work in style!
We re-imagined our work page so that it’s now a long scrolling page, which displays the work we do in a clean, minimal way – easy to digest. With this, we had each of our designers weigh in on their projects, so that they could individually curate and present the work that we do in a great way.
Of course, there are also plenty of other quirks and additions we’ve included in our new site, you know, just for fun. And this list by no means is all that we’ve improved and updated on our site. But no more, take a look and explore!
P.s. In case you’re wondering, our previous website dated from February 2009. Check out what we said about it here.
