The New Improved Pixel Jar – Our Website Redesign
Pixel Jar is always really busy working on client projects, we haven’t had a good opportunity to focus on our own website redesign.
As a web development agency we knew it was time to make some changes. We were suffering from the “cobbler’s kids” syndrome – we had no shoes. We started talking about the content we needed on the website and began working on a content-first approach. Once we knew what we wanted to include on the site, we started looking at the rest of the pieces.
Talking About the Brand
Pixel Jar’s brand is based on a relaxed openness about what we do and who we are. Brandon and Jeff, our co-founders, started working together at a previous web development firm. They formed Pixel Jar because they share an entrepreneurial spirit and complemented each other’s strengths. They both have a common love of surfing and this background definitely played into their early easy-going approach. As they’ve grown the business taking on larger clients they have adapted to a more structured approach while maintaining their approachable and direct style.
In the last two years Pixel Jar has grown, adding Dave Margowsky as project manager and Nate Conley as a developer. With this growth, the number of projects we’ve taken on has grown. We wanted to adjust the look of the Pixel Jar brand to reflect more of where we were headed over where we had come from. To kick off that change, we enlisted the aid of our good friend Robert Nienhuis from Nien Studios.
Looking at the Logo
Robert met with us for a series of four meetings working through the details of our new logo. The logo served as the main touch point for us on the new style that we wanted. We all love Robert’s work and we knew that no matter what we chose we were going to have something that we would be excited to have represent us.
Robert did not disappoint, nor did he make it easy for us to choose. Our new logo is more structured than our previous circle logo. The implied square serves double duty, representing not just the literally shape of a Pixel but also the ubiquitous angle brackets prevalent in writing code. The type was modernized and carefully paired with the new mark.
We were thrilled with the results, but Robert’s work didn’t stop with new logo. He provided us an amazing brand guidelines document that covers all aspects of the logo’s use, the color palette, the typography, and specific design for key collateral materials. The document itself is a thing of beauty showing the new logo mocked up onto shirts, coffee mugs, business cards and more. Truly above and beyond.
Planning the Website Redesign
Excited about the new logo we really had to restrain ourselves from showing it to everyone right away. Instead, we’ve been quietly working to rebuild the website. We’ve leveraged the new colors, typography, and created something that does the new look justice.
One of our major goals was to improve the organic flow of traffic to the website. We’ve been long time user of the Yoast SEO plugin and we have to give a lot of credit to the writing his team provides on their blog. We took a lot of time in realigning our cornerstone content with the needs of our customers. We were able to apply the tools and recommendations that we regularly make to our clients for ourselves.
Aside from our optimization efforts, the new website is much more user friendly, more focused on our current customers, and shows off our abilities in a much more attractive package. A website redesign project like this requires real focus and a time commitment. We had to make this a priority project just as we would for a client. We hope that you, our visitor, are happy with the end result.
If you want to check out our video series capturing the logo redesign you can watch them here.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb4psmFYHzpCGDz_jfc4XNhQWz8H8_mDf
