Asheboro Creative Redesigned

We’ve redesigned our site! Yes, it’s true and plain as day. Over the last two months we’ve been redesigning and developing the content management system for our website. I personally put in a lot of long hours (sometimes 24+ blocks), but I believe it was worth it.

The reason for the upgrade was very simple: we needed more room. Our existing site was not able to handle what we were trying to do, and even from its initial development I believe we had bigger plans in mind. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the look of the original design. I believe it had a lot to do with why we won our web design award from Surpass Hosting, but it just wasn’t able to do what we wanted.

So what’s new with the upgrade? Tons!

We decided early on that we didn’t want to keep content too far from the top, and we wanted to make use of the space we did have. With the original site, there was a lot of whitespace near the logo. The new version uses the space available while not taking up all of it. And since we have gotten into Twitter as much as we have, finding out how valuable it is, we wanted to make sure to mention that we use it.

Twitter Bird

Andrea mocked up a couple Twitter Birds for us, with the one at the top being our favorite. The cute “big eyes” look of the bird made sure it was staying, no matter what happened with the design.

Javascript?

Normally, we haven’t used too much javascript for the simple fact that we didn’t need it for anything. We’re currently using it on the front page and on our forms. On the front page we have our feature rotator that links to interesting content throughout the site. We have also beefed up the rest of the home page with our latest articles, blog posts, and Twitter updates fed directly through the Twitter API.

Optimized

Another thing we wanted to do with the site was to reinvent the SEO. We found that the current version was lacking a lot of effective optimization techniques. We still shot straight to the top of the list under the search terms we wanted, but we saw a lot of potential growth in other areas. Improving our SEO was something we wanted to do with the new system, on every page we have. We designed our CMS to be able to handle what we wanted to do.

Articles and Blog

We have divided the site up into sections that now are capable of holding articles and blog posts separately. Sometimes we write more openly like this, which differs from the articles that we write such as our Validation Survey or our How to Choose a Web Designer article.

Dividing the two makes it possible to put a distinction on what we write. This way, we can let you know what’s going on with the company here and tell you why you need to market over there. It keeps the writing from being too cluttered.

Applications

Did you know that we made applications? If you did, you were in the minority because there really wasn’t any evidence of it on the original site. We let everyone know that we design sites and develop in PHP but never really mentioned any of the applications that we’ve created.

In the applications area of the site you will find a list of the applications we develop. Some are currently available, and we are currently working on getting all of them available online in demo form to show what they can do.

There is a lot more to the site, and we’ve put a lot of time and effort into making it what it is. We hope that you enjoy it and find the information we preset to be very useful. We’ve added share buttons to nearly every page of the site so please do share it with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the rest of the sites listed.

Now, time to rest. Finally.

About Dave

I am the founder of Asheboro Creative. I'm a PHP and MySQL developer that thinks CSS is the greatest thing since the knife that sliced bread. I am a stickler for validating our websites and love to check out design galleries.