If you’re reading this, you’re already seeing the fruits of a design & content refresh that we’ve been working on for the last couple months.  It’s be a fun project, and we still have some polishing to do, but by the end of this week things should be looking really good.

One thing that is interesting is how challenging it can be at times to work on your own site when you do client work. I think its almost a cliche among web design & development firms that they never have a chance to work on their own sites.  However, its important to keep up appearances, and we hope this new site polish does exactly that.  I think Alex (our chief designer) did a great job, and I am sure we’ll hear from him about some of the decisions he made from a design standpoint.

From a content perspective, Peter and I had extensive conversations about what we though we should communicate, and how, and I wanted to share a few of those:

• less is more - people don’t read on the web anymore (why am I even bothering with this post ?!?) - so we really shot for concise, clear copy. we also removed anything extraneous, particularly on the homepage. we’re trying to focus people to the content that says what we do and why you should work with us
• playful - Nothing makes my eyes glaze over like copy that is such corporate-speak that you don’t get any of the personality of the company.  We made attempts to be playful (particularly with our headings) but also professional. How do you think it worked?
• what we do, what we don’t do - one decision we made was trying to let the site act as a filter, in hopes that people would self select on the lead process and the site would deliver better qualified leads.  The fact is that Flatsourcing doesn’t work for everyone.  We work for technical clients, generally startups & development shops who have a strong project manager or lead developer to manage our teams.
• try before you buy - one thing that we are packaging a little more is the test task that we always ask prospective clients to have us complete.  The best way to gauge our skills and experience what its like to work with us is to do just that.  And so we’ve packaged it up a little better and are encouraging people to give us a try.

How does it all come across?  I’d be very interested in your thoughts on the new site.  Please provide any feedback you’ve got in the comments below. Thanks.

We decided to start process of training our designers to create nice and fancy design mock-ups. Since our guys are working mostly on creating and fixing XHTML, we kind of  lost the pulse of art-design and need to catch up.

I assumed that the most efficient way of training would be to copy and re-creating somebody’s designs. We will be re-drawing some of nice popular web-sites to learn the technics, styles, colors, software tools and other stuff.

Internal plan of such training course looked like this:

• 1-st week: 2-3 hours a day - copying already existing design of working and popular web-site. It’s prohibited to take any graphics, everything should be re-drawn from scratch.
• 2-nd week: 2-3 hours a day - changing PSD we’ve created on the 1-st week of training (having in mind that we’re creating design for the real estate company, for example). Designers need to choose:
  • New color scheme (prepared two color schemes for designers to choose from)
  • New logo (can be just a place-keeper)
  • New textures and backgrounds
  • New graphics (can be photo)
  • New menu - changing it to be tab-styled, for example

Here are the details that I will be paying attention to while checking the results:

After the first week of course:

• Similarity with the original design
• Colors
• Textures, main grid
• Choice of fonts
• Shadows
• Overall quality

After the second week of course:

• Quality of choosing new colors
• Ability to built a new logo in the design
• Choice of new textures
• Skills of creating or choosing suitable graphics
• Choice of new menu solution and quality of it’s preparing

As a result each designer has to prepare two mock-ups:

1. copy of original design
2. changed mock-up for the abstract real-estate company

Of course this training plan got a lowest priority among other projects, however I hope we will have some results in a couple of weeks.

Hello Everybody!

After logo redesign I realized that the whole site design seems too dark and colors are not so pretty as logo has. So I applied more bright color scheme, used some components of new logo, created some icons, formatted blog posts and now presenting updated blog.flatsourcing.com design. Please let me know all your comments on that, I love constructive critics and would be happy to apply your comments!

Here it is:

Download full-sized version

Thank you.