Crucial 3.0: Web Hosting Evolves
The dry erase board is wiped clean, mountains of empty soda cans are finally cleared from the desks, and a slight sigh of relief is felt by the design team, but only for a moment. We are proud to announce the new design for Crucial Web Hosting.
Development was started in late December, and with just 45 days to complete the site, we knew there was going to be plenty of long nights and trips to Jack In The Box ahead of us.
Designers and developers always want to mess around with their creations. You’re just never satisfied, and the word "finished" might as well not exist. If it weren’t for some of the members of our design team, we would probably never finish a site. That is probably what makes Crucial tick like a finely tuned watch, all of us bring opposite extremes to the table, but combined it’s a symphony of talent and endless imagination.
Out With The Old
Here is a screenshot of the previous design for Crucial, a polar opposite from the new design:
When we designed that website, we wanted to keep the traditional feel of other web hosting sites. It lacked usability, was full of marketing speak, and is a style of design that we are happy to move past. Was it a bad design? Of course not. But you sure do learn a lot in eight months about what you need to change.
Usability
The main goal of the new design was web usability, and while there is still plenty of testing to be done, we feel the site accomplished this. There was a huge focus on consistency, like making sure every page had a breadcrumb navigation trail, that the URL path, page titles, and headings all matched. A visitor should always know where they are on the site, and should have no problem finding their way around.
Web 2.0
Although sometimes overused, and probably considered trendy, this style of design is more than just glass text, glared buttons, and gradients. It’s extremely usable, and has a very defined split from previous web design trends.
The font face was changed from Verdana to Arial, and the size went from about ten pixels to fifteen pixels. Typography was a big consideration, with emphasis on paragraphs, various heading tags, and blockquotes, meaning the spacing above and below, line height, letter spacing, etc.
There is plenty of whitespace, and the colors should be neutral yet bold, but very easy on the eyes. Nothing too flashy or distracting. Images were kept to a minimum, at least compared to the last design, because the text-based aspect of the site is the usable interface.
Breaking Tradition
Go to any hosting website and you’ll find much of the same. You will probably be greeted with a stock picture of a smiling lady, or a well-dressed man in a suit. A picture of a server is a must, although any computer-related item will suffice. The list goes on and on, but most hosting websites are so…template.
Nothing but cookie-cutter designs and free stock images splattered around. They are usually full of marketing rhetoric, and while this is not a bad thing, the content is mostly, if not always, worthless to a prospective client.
Behind The Scenes
Built from the ground up, the backend of the new Crucial site is amazing. Programmed and designed entirely in-house, it makes updating and organizing the site a dream. Everything is database-driven, from the breadcrumb navigation to active links, and even the URLs.
A glossary and FAQ manager was integrated, which is still under development. It will be equipped with a tagging and rating system, making it easy to sort, categorize, and find answers easily.
The Hat Trick
The real star of Crucial is our updated affiliate program, dubbed Crucial Cash. A lot of time was spent in coming up with numbers that would allow us to give affiliates $101 for their referrals. The program itself had to be rewritten from the ground up, and will soon incorporate advanced reporting features and a lot more goodies.
New Toys
Forum
Leading up to the new design, our clients and those curious about Crucial told us what they wanted to see. There were many requests for a forum, and after a lot of convincing, we decided to take the plunge and integrate one. Though the design has not been incoporated with the rest of the site, it should be a valuable resource for clients and affiliates.
We will be working heavily with the forum too, because we have had a lot of experience with vBulletin in the past. We will breaking tradition on this as well, everything from the markup to available features.
Blog
We started writing posts a couple months before we launched the site, and thought it would be a good way to express ourselves and let everyone see what kind of people are behind the scenes of Crucial.
Uptime Monitoring
Third party monitoring was integrated, allowing clients and the public to see the status of a specific server, complete with graphs and uptime reports. We are proud of our servers, and not worried about releasing this kind of information, which is usually kept private. You can see one of the server stats here.
You Break It, You Buy It!
With that, we hope you enjoy the new design. As cliche as this sounds, we would consider the site in beta. We are certain there are tiny bugs and things that need to be tweaked, and we will be spending the next month cleaning up the code and getting everything finalized.
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Heya… i was looking at the site and didnt realize it earlier… but the white area is set to 100% It looks odd at higher resolutions. It breaks from the focus. Making it fixed and smaller allowing the background to peak out would totally create a focus on the main content.