Not that I’m one to blow my own trumpet (oh okay then, maybe occasionally), but I did want to mention that Smiley Cat Web Design has launched a redesigned version of Jet City Entertainment.
The site is XHTML Transitional and is built entirely in CSS (with much cursing and beating of brows of course).
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the site. It could work better at extreme text sizes and it has a couple of minor hiccups in IE5/Mac, but it’s a major improvement over the old site (which my client built in FrontPage) and blows away the competition. If you’ve ever looked for a DJ online for a wedding or party, the selection of web sites you have browse is pretty horrendous.
I based the color scheme on the client logo, with the aim of going for a warm, inviting design. Based on the survey that I had the client complete at the start of the project, I learned that the majority of Jet City’s web site visitors are female. As a consequence I went with a color scheme and curvey design that I thought would appeal more to women.
My wife (my harshest critic, naturally) proved me right when she immediately commented positively on the color scheme without even being prompted. When the client had some misgivings about it I asked him to check with any women he knew. The next email was as I expected – his girlfriend had told him that she liked it too.
Of course, the real proof of the success of the redesign will be whether/by how much site traffic increases and how the site’s rankings on the search engines improves – I’m expecting that the lightweight CSS-based code should do quite well (it better had – I’m still glueing back in the clumps of hair I pulled out during its development). It’s too early to tell at this point, of course.
I like it – it’s very inviting and professional-looking. It would be interesting to see what it looked like before.
Thanks Jennifer. I was hoping that Google still had the old site cached, but unfortunately they have already indexed the new site.
The good news is that the new, accessible design has put the site on page 2 of Google already for Jet City’s main search phrase. A little tweaking of the body copy and some more links in (through a reciprocal links program), and it won’t be long until they’re on the first page.