UPDATE: StrangeIM launch and rebrand

I've been making some good progress on the jobs I listed on the previous post... I can now cross off CSS, and new logo from the list. Still left is quite  a bit, but alas, another pressing task has come up - planning the Inbound Marketing UK 2012 conference.

Throughout the week I've been busily editing the CSS to reflect the new brand identity. Yesterday, once I'd I got as far as I could, I showed the rest of the office the design and they helped me decide the colour of the navigation bar. Everyone liked it including the director who said "Put it up then!" so then I had to migrate the design from the test site to our existing one.

So here is the dreaded 'before' picture of the homepage. As you can see, it looked pretty basic before, as though we'd only just set up our Hubspot account! Another bug bear of mine was that it had about 4 different fonts on it!

Before

After

The palette we used came from Kulur by adobe and is called "Shore Nuff", which was the torquoisy-teal theme we we're aiming for: 

Using a style sheet that we had used for a client's site, I used the font and layout but tweak graphics and colours to create the home of Strange IM. I changed the focus to the center of the page by creating a blue background instead of and entirely white page. And although it took a while, I managed to download the font to change the logo to the new name.

It's still far from perfect but that's all I'm doing to day as I'd like to get some client blogs done now. I am still thinking about coding to make the H1 (headers) not all capitalized and making it smaller.

The director still wants us to change the feeble attempt at a Call to Action on the top banner, but this is something that will have to wait given the fact there are still clients to serve and a major event to be organised.

Next week (when I get a chance) I will blog about Inbound Marketing UK 2012, giving you a behind the scenes glimpse into the planning of a 400 person summit.

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