Paul is a colleague and a friend as well as a friend’s son. He is an account handler for bluestorm during the week and a car racer in his free time. Along with Joe they compete in hillclimb, sprint race and stage rally competitions across the UK. For a while now they have had a website, to keep their friends and supporters informed about upcoming and past events, showcase their cars etc.
It’s been a year or so since their website hit the internets and it recently became obvious that it needed some changes to accommodate the content. Paul asked me to make these changes and when we were going through it, I realised the site needed a lot of love. [ view the old site ]
Over two weekends and a couple of evenings I gave the site a complete overhaul. I created a completely new, much wider layout with a palette based on their team colors. Instead of re-theming and adjusting the existing site, I rebuilt it from scratch, based on the bluestorm rails cms which was heavily customized to accommodate the existing content.
The homepage was completely redesigned to bring into focus the things that you would want to find as soon as you hit the site. A brief welcome and a slideshow of images that introduce Paul, Joe and the cars are the centerpiece, alongside the latest news and upcoming events.
Apart from the people, big part in the site play the cars. Previously the guys had pages dedicated to their different cars, with images in various sizes embedded in the content. This made the pages extremely long and very difficult to read as the text got lost between the pictures. When embedding the images they had to resize them via the height/width tags, which made images have random sizes and also made the pages look very untidy.
To make their lives easier and make the most of the really cool images they have, I decided to introduce the car galleries. They can still write information about the cars but also upload the original sized images, which are then automatically resized and cropped by the cms to create the gallery thumbnails and the accompanying lightbox images. From these galleries, 4 images are selected and displayed in the homepage, keeping it fresh as they are randomly chosen each time.
Sponsors and merchandise are important, but were previously hidden well inside the site. I brought them to the homepage by adding a callout for the sponsors, which are always necessary when you are in such an expensive sport as car racing, as well as a callout for their merchandise, directly linking to the shop.
I also added the custom youtube player to the homepage and the video section. Even with their lack of technical knowledge, they can now upload their videos to their youtube channel and feed them straight to the site. Other changes include an rss feed, the site search and other minor tweaks which will hopefully make their lives easier when updating the site, but also provide a better and more engaging user experience for visitors. I will be monitoring it for the next few weeks, tweaking what needs tweaking and adjusting things if need be.
Time will show how well this redesign works and what results it has. Hopefully you will like the site as much as we do.
This is a solid redesign girl, kudos :)
Excellent re-design… Simple, slick and effective. Nice job…
One minor detail. On chrome, when you click on an image on the front, the video player cuts through it.
Congrats…
Thx guys!
@Dimitris: unfortunately I don’t have windows to check on chrome at all. Will try and get a machine with it to have a look tho. Thanks for the tip.
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Follow me on twitterI have a dream that all my websites will one day exist in a Web where they will not be judged by how they look and behave in each browser, because all browsers will follow the same standards and display them the same.
This is my hope. With this faith in Web Standards and Accessibility for all people and devices we will be able to make a better Web. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of the browsers to a beautiful symphony of design, functionality and content. With this faith we will be able to work better, to play better, to struggle less, knowing that all devices will treat our work equally & with respect.
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the views expressed throughout this site are my own
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What can I say except WOW!! When Bluestorm first agreed to sponsor me and let me have a site for the rally team I was really chuffed to have an online ‘shop window’ to direct people to.
After a chat with Maria about how the site was being used and whether or not she could make a couple of small changes to enable me to use the CMS easier on that site, she asked me to leave the website in her hands and trust her judgement as to what would work best.
Again, all I can say is WOW! Massive thank you to Bluestorm, but most of all to Maria - I didn’t expect this to come of our conversation but to say I’m gobsmacked is a mahooooooosive understatement!
Thank you so much :-)