We were contacted by a client who had referred a number of non-profits to us to see about redesigning the website for the Eastern Surfing Association of Southern North Carolina. As we often see incases like this, the original site was built by someone who didn’t really have any website experience, but wanted to help them have a web presence.
The goal of the redesign was simply to give it a facelift, which is what we did. The new design is more engaging with a subtle slightly opaque background to show off the watery background, which was taken from the Association’s parent website as a nod to them. The navigation menu has been restructured to try to make browsing the website more intuitive.
On the old website, news items and recent events were just added to the homepage. We replaced that with a Recent News section, which dynamically updates as blog articles are added. In addition to that, the revised homepage includes an image slider and prominent buttons to important sections of the website.
National sponsors were previously displayed in a small graphic at the top of the homepage, but we moved them to the sidebar on every page. We also set the images to display in random order, so each sponsor has a chance at being the most prominent on the page. We did the same in adding a page for local sponsors.
Previously, all the documents of the website were uploaded in their original file format, such as .doc or .xls. On some pages, this left a lot of unused, empty space, so we converted all the documents into PDF files and embedded them into the page along with a button to download the file.