The Story Behind Our Redesign
When we launched our self-service upgrades last week we also launched a radically new design, a new logo, new company pages, new customer support site, and new about pages. There’s definitely some backstory that I’d like to share.
New information
As we’ve worked on our products, the most important thing we wanted to do was make the packages page reflect what we were actually offering and to give people more options. However, we also wanted a place to collect and answer user support requests, so we added a support forum from GetSatisfaction. We’d recommend their service to anyone. We also added a new about page so we could talk about all the wonderful people who make this company run.
More Talking
Last year, MPI, one of two major associations for the meetings industry, invited us to their Meet Different conference, which was focused on all the ways that meetings are changing. Except for us, nobody from the techie startup world was represented. MPI talked about unconferences but I didn’t see any big names from the Open Space movement (Kaliya Hamlin would have been a good choice). They had big attendee PDA vendors, but I didn’t see any hackers like the ones who put together the location-aware social network at Last HOPE. The agenda builder they offered was completely unusable. That’s surprising, because I know two different pairs of programmers who built amazing agenda builders in less than two days. One of those products, icalico, is the base of our calendar/agenda-builder feature.
In the world we’re coming from, Silicon Valley web startups, there’s a lot of great innovation that directly affects conferences. Often, it seems the people we know who are innovating are miles away from talking to the people who are putting on conferences. We like talking to both camps, so we’re going to do more talking. In the old design, our blog was hidden away in the footer. Now our most recent posts and twitters are right on the home page.
Our History
Just for fun, I pulled screen shots of our major designs. We’ve had four. The first was when I was sharing a CrowdVine prototype. Bad design was good for our prototype because we really had to be useful in order to get any compliments.
The second was done by our friends at Neatworks Inc for our first product, now called CrowdVine for Groups. I remember jumping around my house because for the first time we looked like a real company.
The third design was when we added CrowdVine for Conferences. We did the entire design ourselves because we were still on a tight budget. I never thought it had much curb appeal but that didn’t seem to matter because all of our business was coming from word of mouth.
For the fourth (current) design we ran two design competitions on 99designs. I already blogged about the logo competition. We ran a second competition for our home page and that’s where this design came from.
