Dont Trust This Guy why not take my word for it? A blog by Jim Jeffers

I’m proud today to announce that we have finally finished putting enough spit and polish onto the new Sitewire web page that it’s ready for public attention. I handled all of the design, flash work, and html/css development while balancing other projects brought to me within Sitewire. The experience has been hectic at times but overall unique. For example, during the design phase of the project I wasn’t allowed to work in the office so I worked remotely from nearby coffee shops around town. Even more interesting - we rented truckloads of photography and lighting equipment and converted our office kitchen into a makeshift photo studio to do a staff-wide photo shoot as we didn’t have the time or the budget to accomplish at a professional studio.

A lot of things happened simultaneously during this project. Design concepts and brainstorming were being developed the same time as messaging and copy. This made both phases of the project a little less efficient from a time perspective but much more collaborative as both design inspired new copy and new copy inspired new ideas for design. Though things felt a bit hectic at times, I’m fairly pleased with the final result. The site is a bit heavy, but overall it’s pretty solid. So with that being said I present to you the new Sitewire.com. Take a look and share your thoughts whenever you get a chance.

If you’re reading this your feedback is required. I’m redesigning my blog by heavily hacking up Squible to the point I probably won’t be able to upgrade past 2.5 alpha. Oh well so be it. Here’s what I’m doing.

The color scheme

I’m trying a salmon (pink) and blue color scheme. I wanted to try something I wouldn’t normally do and I kind of like it even though it creeps me out. Normally I’d just do black and grey so this is a refreshing change.

The header

The header of the page is designed to look like a torn up news paper an there is a live flickr feed that has been styled to resemble polaroid photos. The idea was to make the site resemble a dirty torn up unreliable newspaper to make it even less “trustworthy”.

The content (style)

Overall the site is using serif fonts to resemble a newspaper rather than more screen friendly fonts such as Arial, Verdana, etc. The content is using the less is more approach. There are just some lines and slight background touches to spruce things up a little but but otherwise from that the text is text and nothing more to take your eye away from that fact.

I’m not even close to being done.

I still have to style the interior footers and comments so stay tuned but let me know if you like the direction.