Fixpert

I’m so excited, last night we launched a completely redesigned and recoded version of Crutchfield Advisor.

This site is the “sister site” of Crutchfield.com. It’s an editorial site that is loaded with tons of useful content. There are articles like How to Choose a Digital Camera, product reviews like the latest look at the SIRIUS Starmate, and some really helpful instructional installation videos. This site is really the heart and soul of what distinguishes Crutchfield as one of the best online retailers out there. It’s also an important site for bolstering Crutchfield.com’s business because consumer electronics can be complex and confusing (not to mention expensive), so Advisor aims to educate and instill confidence in our customers.

Web Standards, Yipee!
As the Art Director, I really take a lot of pride in this site. That’s why I’m tickled that we just recoded the site to Web Standards, stripping out all of those ugly nested tables, and getting down to clean semantic markup. The project had started about six months ago, my team — at the time that was just one intern and myself — was transitioning from one boss to another and found ourselves with a bit of down time as things settled. Tim the intern and I sprang into action and quickly began an effort to recode the foundation of the site. We didn’t have huge visual redesign plans at that point, we just wanted clean markup to use as a starting point. We only got a few days into it until our attention was required elsewhere (the Crutchfield.com redesign), and the project sat there until about a month ago when another opportunity arose.

Learning from Jason Fried
Tim is away at college now (we miss you Tim!) but Baron from IT stepped in and wielded his judo-coding-CHOP onto this spaghetti nest of a web site. It’s interesting because, like many of you, I too enjoyed the podcast of Jason Fried’s presentation about creating Basecamp. One major theme in there was working on the product as though it were in perpetual beta mode. This means, get it out there, get it live, make tweaks, fixes and enhancements live after it’s out. What a great theme to have in the back of my head during this Advisor redesign. If I had waited until Advisor was perfect in my mind before releasing, it would never have happened. We just had to get something out there, make sure it was an improvement over the previous site, and now that it’s live we can continue to make improvements and add polish (there are still a few tables buried here and there that I can’t wait to zap).

Another good lesson from Jason’s podcast was the advantage of working with a small team. There were never more than two people working on this redesign. It was either Tim and I or later on, Baron and I — and that’s it! And I was shocked at how much two people can accomplish when given the freedom and authority to go all out. It was so refreshing. It demonstrated how much time gets lost to the decision-making process in larger team environments.

About Freedom and Authority
Ok, ok, I should clarify. In the last paragraph, I made it sound like we were handed the reigns and told “go for it!” I should explain that this entire redesign was a bit of a covert operation. It was at the bottom of my list of projects as far as prioritization was concerned, so most of the work had to be done after hours and on the weekends because it was not widely “blessed”. We really had to be low key, eventhough we knew what we were doing would be beneficial for the customers and the business.

Some Highlights
Here are some of the new things that we just rolled out:

• New look and feel
• Clean standards compliant code
• Prominent linkage to our RSS feed
• Modularized sidebar components coded more efficiently on the backend
• Print.css stylesheet

Big thanks to Tim and Baron, this never would have happened without you guys.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.