After serving the agency faithfully for more than a dozen years, our original website design is being retired in favor of a new responsive website design. But not without some appreciation puleeze!
Way back in 1999, when agency Senior Designer Kevin Herman created the original site, the look and feel won design awards for its innovative and playful look. Coding was static HTML (typical then) with icons were created by friend and Santa Cruz illustrator Doug Ross. The homepage featured an animated gif of the Los Gatos theater marquee just a few doors away from our downtown location. Since then the theater itself has had a facelift and the marquee is down for renovation. In that time the agency has moved twice, first across the street above the art gallery at 24 N. Santa Cruz and then up to our current headquarters above Los Gatos in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Before Y2K, much of the site typography was image-based because we had a definite print mindset. Of course Google couldn’t read it but we didn’t care so much then. Now we do. The old width was set to fit within 640K in order to display on the small CRT devices of the time. There was no integrated blog and no social icons because Facebook didn’t yet exist.
In 2006, Patrick chose to keep the design but make numerous updates including: 1. coding in PHP to make changes quicker, 2. dropping “Advertising” from the agency name in favor of “Brand Development”, 3. enlarging the page width, 4. making all the content readable by Google, 5. re-specifying the green, 6. enlarging the page to 720 px and 7.adding lots more current website and print project examples.
Nowadays we appreciate the value of Search Engine Optimization and apply best on-page SEO practices on all our our client sites. The lack of content on our beloved homepage – the most important page for indexing – is a definite no-no. And projects are sadly displayed too small to appreciate their visual impact. Finally, the code isn’t responsive, so viewing on mobile devices requires thumb acrobatics just to get through the site.
So…out with the old, in with the new website design. We think Google Analytics on our new site will show increased traffic, more page views and a higher conversion rate. Give us a call or email us and let us know what you think!