Project Summary
I have worked at Envision, first as the Creative Director, then as the Director of Web Development, and now the Director of Marketing, since 2008. This latest website marks the 3rd full redesign of the company's website that I have done during my time with the company.
The first site I created for Envision was in 2008 as part of our 10-year anniversary. In 2012, I launched another new site to coincide with the company's a big move into new office space. That site served us well for years, and we made many small changes to it over time, but in late 2015 I began to realize that we had pushed that site about as far as we could. It was time again for a redesign.
The visual design work for the new Envision website was started in late 2015. Unfortunately, a number of other projects and priorities diverted our attention until the spring of 2016 when I decided to pick the project back up and use it as an excuse to learn some lessons in web design that I had been having trouble finding the time to master. I made it a point to find ways to work with some of new techniques and technologies during this site's development, including CSS flexbox and mutli-column layout, SVG images, Img srcset, feature queries, and more . We also decided to use the latest version of the ExpressionEngine CMS, version 3, for this deployment. In addition to these items, I also looked for differnet solutions for the site's responsive navigation and I made download speed and performance a major priority in the project. These were all areas where I had wanted to focus more attention, but which project deadlines and requirements had kept me from playing with the way I wanted to. Using the new Envision site as my sandbox proved to be an exciting, fun, and incredibly informative experience and I can honestly say that I came out on the other side of the project as a better web design than I went in as!
To add another challenge to this project, just as we neared completion and prepared to launch the new site, Envision acquired another company and we immediately had to integrate their content into our site as part of our newly created Digital Innovation & Design division. I made those integrations into the site and we launched it to the world on Monday, September 26th, announcing our new acquisition one day later.
You can see the new site at www.envisionsuccess.net or read a bit more about the "web design learning" experiment I used for this project.