Practice what you preach; we’ve re-aligned

We at nclud "create unique, stylish and usable designs for the web utilizing industry best practices and forward-thinking methodologies"; at least that is what we do for our clients. For any agency, or designer for that matter, your own web presence seems to always get second priority, leaving it far removed from the perfection you often demand of your work. We are no exception and we’ve spent the last two months re-aligning nclud.com to better reflect our definition of unique, stylish and usable.

The previous design went up exactly two years ago today. Much has changed in the past two years. Our portfolio has grown, our team has grown, and our studio space as grown – even the industry has grown, the iPhone was just a nerd's dream in late 2006. While we love our original design and it continues to be copied to this day, the more we grew the more we grew apart from it. We never had any intention of redesigning our site – our style, tone, messaging, aesthetic; our brand is something we’ve established and work to build upon, not change. While aesthetically our new visual design is different from its previous version, it is very much the same.

It is with great pleasure that we introduce to everyone our new and improved web presence at nclud.com.

The Approach

The objective was simple, to create something that felt like ours. As any designer knows, it can be a struggle to be unique on the web; anything that’s created can most likely be compared to some degree to something already existing – assuming that you’re creating for an intuitive user-experience. We didn’t strive to be different for the sake of being different, we sought out avoid popular trends and focus on a concept that did nothing more or less than just feel like our brand personality. The most significant change was going to a larger layout and displaying more content; focusing now more on our growing portfolio, our growing team and our growing list of happy clients.

The first iteration of our website was designed and built specifically for who we were at the time, a very small group with a very small portfolio. And when we more than double in size again, we’ll probably be rethinking many of our decisions made today. Our goal was to keep our essence the same, just introduce changes required to accommodate who we’ve become; to design and execute an elegant re-alignment.

More Expressive with ExpressionEngine

The newest version of nclud is of course as beautiful in the code-behind as the front-facing aesthetic, if we do say so ourselves. We are rocking HTML 5 with a bit of jQuery and keeping our love for CSS and front-end development as clean, semantic and magnificent as ever; all completely powered by ExpressionEngine.

In late 2006 there were a variety of Content Management Systems for powering content-light websites; but we loved and advocated for the textile based TextPattern. MoveableType has its complications; WordPress and ExpressionEngine were not yet where they are today and we were never that impressed with Joomla or Drupal. While there is still a space in our heart for TextPattern, the evolution of ExpressionEngine over the past two years has made it the perfect fit for us, and for many of our clients. That, and we can’t wait to get our hands on ExpressionEngine 2.0 when it is finally released! While it is something seldom seen by the public, one of our primary objectives was to ensure our site was as intelligently constructed as the sites we develop for our clients. Ensuring everything is powered by the CMS in an organized and dynamic fashion, even our mobile version.

Web Design To-go, Going Mobile

Our analytics might not yet be reflecting it and our client base might not yet be asking for it, but the mobile web has become an important part of our industry and most definitely a fascination of our agency. Every member of the nclud team has an iPhone and we can’t honestly remember life without it (nor do we wish too). While we often preach about designing for the user-experience, the reality is that we must always keep in the mind the brand-experience. We put a special focus on ensuring our mobile version was optimized for the user-experience but kept the brand experience in sync.

The mobile web is redefining itself every day; Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android are leading that change in a significant and growing fashion. In late 2006 there was no norm with respect to the “mobile web” (the once popular Blackjack wasn’t even on the market yet), but now 80% of mobile web traffic comes from a device with less than 20% market share; the iPhone. And this happened simply because they didn’t make getting to the Internet easier on a mobile device, they made the experience better. As the significance of the mobile web increases, so does our desire to accommodate for it. The latest iteration of our web presence has an optimized experience specifically tailed for the mobile web. Much in the spirit of the iPhone; we didn’t simply make our site easier to get to on a mobile device, we made the experience better. By tapping into the powerful dynamic nature of ExpressionEngine, we ensure that the content delivered to a mobile device comes from the same place as the a standard desktop view, but perfectly optimized; from shorter more direct content to smaller more optimized images, the experience is specifically tailored. We design for the most powerful of mobile devices and utilize graceful degradation to further optimize the experience to accommodate all.

And, launched!

We kept brand integrity top-of-mind while ensuring an elegant user-experience. Take a look around and let us know what you think!