Our New Website
Yesterday, we launched version 4 of the Eric Miller Design website. Here’s an overview of what we did, why we did it and the technologies used.
Design
While we experimented with several complete redesigns, in the end we decided to keep the overall style and improve upon it. This includes a wider layout that allows for more white space, redesigned navigation and updated typography. We also updated the header to incorporate our new logo.
Development
We kept the site in our favorite CMS, ExpressionEngine, and utilized some add-ons for new features. Project pages can now have related blog posts using Solspace’s Related Entries module. The contact page also utilizes a Solspace add-on, the Freeform module, allowing us to store project inquiries within the system. The Twitter Timeline plugin is used to show recent Tweets on the main blog page. SlideShowPro is used for the portfolio galleries, with each ExpressionEngine entry passing an XML variable for the project.
Code
Since the last version of our site was several years old, we started from scratch with the CSS and XHTML, making it more flexible and bringing it up to current web standards.
Content
We rewrote a lot of our content and reorganized the sections. The blog is all new (you’re reading it) and we combined what used to be “web” and “print” sections into one portfolio to accommodate the variety of projects we’ve completed, with the option to view specific categories. We also incorporated a recent article from about.com (written by Eric) on the home page and social networking links in the footer.