The time has finally come. After a redesign process that started in early April with the creation of the unique homepage, the new version of the springfield connection has arrived. Two and a half months doesn’t sound much, but it felt like a hell of a lot longer. Although I drew a lot of inspiration from the old design, it was a complete reworking of the entire site structure. There is now not a single table on the site, which is quite an achievement as that is pretty rare on Simpsons fansites.
So why did I redesign in the first place? After all, I’ve always said that the old design is one of the best things I’ve ever made. But I felt restricted by it, and I wanted to move on before I started to hate it for feeling stale. So I looked at the old design and thought about what I wanted to implement – the pink and the ‘logo’ were a certainty, and I ended up keeping exactly the same shade. I wanted to keep the donut background, because I felt it added something and was different.
I knew also that I wanted to create something completely different to anything in the community. As nice as the old design was, it followed a familiar two-columned structure that I was starting to feel restricted by. So I opted for an extra-wide internal content area, and a stand-alone front page that highlighted the best of the site. I also really wanted to bring two of our best features – drain and the episode guide – to the homepage, and so when I settled upon a tabbed feature area, these two were shoo-ins to have their own tabs. I also reduced the site updates into one tab, because I hate how inactive a site looks if there have been no updates for a while.
I settled on the homepage pretty quickly – it was built up from the drain carousel, although it was changed extensively. The feature area was large and really focused on imagery, with some nice understated jQuery effects to slide the text into view. I also decided to use jQuery to make the logo drag-and-drop – a completely pointless feature, but one that just made the design seem more fun. That was what I really wanted from this – a fun design that was easy to navigate, and really drew you in.
So I dedicated the bottom half of the homepage to navigation (with a small space for a poll) so that the three section titles were prominant, and when clicked on they showed the section’s contents. That left me with a blank space for when none of the tabs were clicked, and so I decided to use this space as a way of showcasing any pages that suffer from a lack of exposure. It works really well, in my biased opinion ;O
As far as interiors were concerned, I just wanted something that would fit seamlessly with the main page, and I hope I achieved that. The navigation is replicated exactly, to breed familiarity, although it is now right up at the top of the page. The logo is next to it, and the background of the header is a remnant of the old tsc design which I really like.
And as for the content? Clearly the most important part of the design, it is highlighted with a bright pink title bar, that was inspired by the old design, too, and from there downwards, I tried to make every page completely unique. The movie page encapsulates this idea perfectly, and the grey subnavigation bar is also commonly used throughout the site to give some sort of consistency to it. Doing the interiors like this has taken a hell of a long time – each page required fresh thinking, design and layout wise, because it couldn’t just be copied over from the old design – but I personally feel it has been time well spent. You want to look through this site, and I don’t think that really happened with the old design. We’ll have to see how this one is received, but I know, deep down, that it is definitely one of the best designs I’ve created, ever.
So definitely a worthy successor for version six.
design, noteworthy, technical, tsc
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