New Yummygum website
A couple days ago we launched our brand new website. At first glance there might not be a huge difference compared to our old website. That is probably because we’ve worked really hard to maintain the clean and minimalist look we had going on before. Truth is, there are a lot of tiny things that have changed. In this post we want to give you some insights on what and why stuff have changed.
The biggest change we’ve tried to make is a focus shift while keeping the website very ‘Yummygum-ish’. The past year and a half we’ve been trying to actively position Yummygum as a Graphical User Interface (GUI) design company whereas our old website portrayed us as a company that just ‘makes websites or logos’. The shift in focus comes to show in both the text copy and the time spend on showing visitors our love for detail. After all, what good are our words saying ‘we care about details’ if we don’t show it.
Increased grid width
The first thing we did was increasing the width of our website. Stats for our old website showed there was a negligible percentage of people who visited yummygum.com with a small resolution last year. And even though our new slider images on the homepage may come across overwhelming for tiny resolution screens, they don’t exceed a width of 940 pixels.
Ditching Dutch copy
Although only people with a Dutch IP number got to see the Dutch version of our previous website, we did in fact have one. Since we’ve been primarily aiming at international clients (or internationally minded clients/businesses if you will), we decided to get rid of the Dutch version.
Displaying images
We used to have a soft dropshadow on images whereas they have more subtle effects applied to them on the new website.
Work by project
One thing that’s undergone some major changes is our Work (aka portfolio) section. On our previous website we used to categorize our work while on our new website we want keep the amount of work down to a maximum of about 6 items; quality over quantity. That maximum also meant there was no more need for categorization. Also, for the new website, if we were to do multiple things for a client (eg. an app icon, a webapp UI and a promotional website) we can show all of those products within one portfolio item.
One thing you’ll notice about the single item pages are animations based on scrollposition (thanks to our good friend Tom Arnfeld). We think it just makes everything look a little more special.
Footer with navigation
Some portfolio items got really long so we put in a footer on the bottom of each page. That way the visitor wouldn’t have to scroll all the way back to the top to navigate to different pages. Also, we felt that the navigation and it’s page titles could be shorter and catchier. That’s why we replaced ‘portfolio’ with the more fun word ‘work’. ‘About us’ has become ‘About’.
Photography on the About page
We received a lot of positive feedback on our office pictures we posted on our (old) blog. We figured the new website would need some fresh portrait pictures as well as new pictures of our office. The office represents a big part of who we are and what we’re about, so you can now find pictures of our office on the About page.
Other changes
Besides the above there’s a long list of minor changes. For example, we got rid of the ‘request-a-quote’ form and the options for clients to log in on our Customer Relationship Management webapp through our website. Oh, and we now have our address on our Contact page. We increased the size of our logo on the top left of the page and used a soft blue-ish grey instead of a desaturated grey for body text. The buttons are done with CSS3 and don’t rely on a fall back image for non-modern browsers. Last but not least, our new blog is powered by Tumblr and English only!
We think it’d be cool to go through the pages on our new website and pay attention to all of the changes we’ve made, now that you know about them.
