TextDrive Redesign

Published 29 November 05 by Justin French, 15 comments

Visually

Whilst the original design had a certain “we know it could be better but we’re too damn busy” charm about it, we were increasingly frustrated by it day-to-day. While I was in San Diego late October, it was finally decided that I’d get to work on it.

More than anything else, the driving force behind the design was a strong desire to not look like the average hosting company with glossy pictures of a CEO strutting in front of server racks, or of beautiful smiling women in headsets waiting to take your call, or even of servers floating above a lovely drop shadow and star-burst price tag. No thanks.

Secondly, I set myself a few challenges. No drop shadows, no gradient fills, no rounded corners, and to a certain degree, no real stylistic treatments. Rather than relying on these quick fixes to create something impressive, I wanted to “solve” the “problem” through typography, color, space and visual hierarchy. Everything needed to have a purpose.

Take away the glossy photos, take away most of the stylistic treatments, and you’re left with a pretty boring home page. So the next step was to give the site an persona that matched TextDrive.

The main banner photo on the home page was shot by myself whilst in San Diego meeting the rest of the TextDrive crew. The idea is that periodically (as in, every month or so) we’ll swap the image out for something else that’s somewhat abstract, but also closely related to TextDrive and the lives of it’s people. Expect to see everything from Tacos to Oliver in there.

The color pallet will be borrowed from the colors found in the photo, so the whole site should feel pretty fresh every few weeks.

We also take a feed direct from the TextDrive Flickr Photostream, so (hopefully) our existing and potential customers will see an organisation that consists of real people with real lives. I doubt you’ll see such candid shots on the standard corporate website.

It’s a work in progress and by no means done, but I’m proud of the foundation work that’s been done.

Structurally

No big surprises here, but it’s a Rails application. There’s not much database activity going on here (just the FAQs), and there was no real reason to go with Rails over a hand rolled PHP thing, but it’s our platform of choice, and makes a wonderful (if not slightly over the top) templating system. As we build on the site, I’m sure we’ll be glad we made the switch early.

Much of the content was shuffled as well. 8 new plans were introduced, and people needed to be able to find what they need with ease. Wherever possible, we took away any content that wasn’t crucial to new customers. Everything that existing customers need (like technical FAQs, mailing lists, status posts) will be made available elsewhere.

Organizationally

TextDrive, the company has changed too. We were acquired/merged with Joyent a company (and group of individuals) I’m excited to work with. It’s not every day you get to work with the likes of John Gruber and be part of what I’m certain will be one of the companies at the fore-front of the new web. It’s a perfect fit, and everyone is really happy.

The announcement certainly pushed the launch date of the new website forward a bit, but it was well worth it.

Here’s to something big!