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Hip, hip hooray! Break out the bubbly! Andornot has launched a new website for… ourselves!

If you’re reading this blog post on our new site, you can see the fruits of our labour for yourself, and perhaps nothing more need be said. However, since this was long overdue, and a long process, perhaps you’ll indulge us and let us tell you the full story.

Why We Did This

All year long we work with you, our clients, to update your websites and applications. We’re usually very pleased with the results and love to talk about our work. Alas, we don’t always have time to practice what we preach and somehow never quite got around to updating our own website. We’ve always been good about blogging, tweeting and emailing about topics and projects we think you’ll be interested in, but a website re-fresh was somehow put off for another day. Does this ever happen to you? 

Finally we reached the breaking point: our somewhat older eyes could no longer read the text on our site, with its rather small font size! It had to go, and along with it, an aging design. It was time for something new.

How We Did This

We spent some long sessions discussing the look we wanted and came up with a list of other websites that we liked.  We all have very strong opinions, but fortunately we all agreed that we wanted a simpler, minimalist style.  Ted hand-crafted the layout and design based on our overall design goals, and using the Zurb Foundation responsive web framework. This ensures the website is as usable and readable in a desktop web browser as on a tablet or iPhone, as this is part of our standard approach to web design now.

We continue to use the Umbraco Content Management System and blogengine.net to manage our site and blog, both hosted in our data centre. Ted built up the new site in each of these web applications.

After seeing our old content in our new design, Jonathan revised the site architecture and rewrote much of the content. He tried to provide clear and concise descriptions of the key solutions, products and services we provide, as well as incorporate details of projects from our blog that will be of interest to you.  

Peter re-jigged the popular Andornot Search Cannery Wizard for the new site, so it continues to help you created canned queries into Inmagic WebPublisher PRO databases and the Genie integrated library system.

Kathy reviewed, critiqued and niggled over formatting and content changes just as with all the designs since the very first Andornot website 18 years ago.

And together, many months later, we pushed the big red button and pulled the large silver lever to launch the site. Hence the champagne.

What Came Before

Thanks to the Internet Archive Way Back Machine, we have a collection of previous versions of our site.

Remember that the design of these older sites are the product of their times, much like your high school yearbook photo. They’re embarrassing, but nostalgic.

Andornot Website 1997 Andornot Website 1998-1999 Andornot Website 2000-2004 Andornot Website 2005-2009 Andornot Website 2010-2013

How you Can Do This Too

Hire Andornot and relax.

or

  • Get yourself a content management system; it really does make website management easier. 
  • Make a short list of sites you like, for both their design and their content. 
  • Find a designer to create a look unique for you (or purchase and tweak one of the many excellent pre-created design templates). 
  • Find a developer to craft the HTML and CSS, and integrate it into your content management system or build up static web pages.
  • Review, revise and rewrite your content to be sure it speaks to visitors/users/staff.
  • Launch!

Let us know what you think of the new site, and please feel free to comment on any of our blog posts and subscribe to our newsletter. If you need assistance updating your own website, we’d be happy to help!

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