You may have noticed that Imagine Monkey got a fancy new redesign over the weekend. But… didn’t we just do a full rework of our site? You bet! In designing our clients’ sites, we started to notice a few things about our own that we felt needed to be addressed. So, as a result, we scaled back and lightened up.
A good business knows that change is inevitable. You’ve got to move forward to stay relevant and, while it’s easy to get attached to the past, it’s more important to look towards the future. Because of that, performing a regular website redesign not only refreshes your brand’s image, it ensures that it’s taking advantage of modern technologies and trends so that you can stay on track for future successes.
So what’s new on the Imagine Monkey website?
Well, the navigational structure has been completely revamped, utilizing a sidebar. This leads to a stronger, natural focus on page content with less top-heavy distractions. With all relevant links in a fixed position on the lefthand side of the page, visitors know exactly where to look for the links they need.
In addition to ease of use, the new navigation allows for better display on mobile devices. And, as we all know by now, Google loves a mobile friendly site! Our old site, while mobile responsive, was better suited for desktop display, where users could enjoy the rich graphics, the custom features and the abundant text. Which leads us to the second major change…
Sometimes, less is more
With a custom website, it’s easy to fall into the trap of adding “one more feature.” Well, over time, one more feature adds up to a lot of features… a lot of unnecessary images, videos, text and transitions. While it’s great to flex your creative muscles, you risk overloading your visitors with too much information if you try to include everything and the kitchen sink.
In light of that, we took a cold, hard look at the amount of content on our site and decided to make some cuts. By reducing the amount and variety of content, we literally cut our page load time by over seventy percent. That’s huge! Not only does it ensure that visitors reach and load our site in a timely manner, it promises to improve our overall SEO by reducing the time it takes for Google to index it.
All told, we’re loving the new design. Already, we’ve had a number of comments on its sleek, elegant look and, moving forward, we anticipate that it will serve us well… for a few months, at least!