The New AtenDesignGroup.com

Over the past few months, we've been working to redesign our website to better reflect our identity, our work, and our process.

Our previous website was functional, but it didn't do a great job of showing our passion for our work, our process, and our people. It also didn't give us much room to maneuver if we ever wanted to do something a little different when featuring a project or writing a blog post.

The new design solves the problems we had with the previous design by giving us the flexibility to create custom designs for featured work, a better framework for writing blog posts, and a much prettier interface, both on the front and back-end. We've also built the new site on Drupal 7, the latest version of our CMS of choice. With all that said, let's take a quick look at the new design…

The Home Page

We've restructured and re-focused the home page to highlight three main areas:

  • Features: We'll be using the most prominent area of the home page to feature our latest work and any news we want to highlight.
  • From the Blog: Blogs have become an important part of how we communicate online. The new design provides greater flexibility for promoting posts to the home page.
  • Twitter & Flickr Feeds: We're now pulling the latest content from our Twitter and Flickr feeds so you can keep up with what we're writing about and check out photos from our recent activities.

Our Work

In the past, we featured every project we completed under "Our Work," which was great for showing the breadth of work we've done. The problem with showing everything was that it quickly grew into a large pool of projects where a small online game had the same weight as a 6-month project. It was hard to judge the scale of each project when they all had the same level of prominence.

Now, we're featuring more in-depth case studies for selected projects to give a much better idea of the work we're capable of. The added benefit of having a smaller number of case studies is that we can completely customize the look and feel for each page. We've developed a design direction for case studies but we're also free to change the design as we need to.

Finally, our client list highlights all the organizations we've worked for and we'll be adding project details for each of those clients soon.

Our Process

We have an iterative process here at Aten that's focused on getting feedback and making improvements based on that feedback. The better clients understand the process and where they're involved, the better the process works. We've created this section of the website to help clients learn what to expect during each phase of the project. We also have a really awesome Venn Diagram to illustrate how each phase of the process relates to the other phases.

Blog

We've updated the blog to allow for easier navigation by category or author and now feature author information on each post. Comments are now shown in speech bubble style so it looks like the person commenting is actually talking, er, well… it at least looks cool, right?

About

The About page does a great job of highlighting how we work as a team and with the client to create work that's in the best interest of the user. You can learn more about each member of the team and even take a trip back in time to find out how Aten started and where the name came from.

Contact

This page is pretty self-explanatory. There's a form. You fill it out and press a button. We get a message.

That about covers everything. We'll be making incremental changes to the site in the coming days so stay tuned for more updates. We're really excited about the new site and would love to hear what you think. Send us a message through our contact form or, better yet, write a comment on this post.

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