Macsi Website Design in Somerset gets a new look

Posted by Colin Hall on Friday 18th of May 2012

Ok, so it has been around 3 months since we decided the website needed a refresh.

Then we got busy. With client work and projects to do, your own website is not the top priority. For the last three months, our website has been a nicely designed holding page. Then three weeks ago we decided enough was enough, we couldn't take on any new client work as our website was in desperate need of attention! This website design company in Bridgwater needed a new design for its website.

So we started to plot the course of this website design project. It had to use modern mark-up, HTML5 and CSS3, but it also had to be accessible back to IE7. We decided to drop IE6 as it has a very small market share, less than 3%, and its inability to handle many CSS styles correctly or transparent images meant it wasn't worth including.

The design had to be interactive, things had to move around and be usable. It had to work well on all devices, from Windows PCs to iPads to android phones.

Initially, we sat and wrote down the most important things we wanted the site to offer, with the top priority being it had to show what we could, so it was vital it had a portfolio. It must also include the various systems we have made, such as Booked It! and Website Macsimiser. Finally, we wanted to create some special package deals with the various brands of Macsi Limited.

We got to work on the design. We had some very good initial ideas to develop; we liked the idea of a changing header, one that could be a fading changer, or a sliding interactive feature.

We also wanted the website to carry a good amount of content and images and be informative.

We settled on the final design and got to work in making it in code. The site was going to be run on our own CMS - Website Macsimiser.

We built the website templates and got to work on coding up the interactive features. All interactive features were built and coded in-house using jQuery and Javascript. We did build some function using the new CSS3 transitions but support for browsers is not great for these functions, so we decided to use jQuery for now and will use transitions at a future date, when they are more compatible with the browsers.

After the site was built and running perfectly in Firefox / Chrome / Opera / Safari and IE9, we got to work making the site backward compatible to IE7. This was quite a long and drawn out process and took our team two days to complete. The results, though, mean we are hitting a large portion of the market as IE7 and IE8 still carry a large amount of users, around 11% of the total market.

The new site was released on Tuesday evening and so far all comments have been extremely positive.

There is still a lot in the pipeline for this site and we already have a list of enhancements that we are going to be doing
in the coming weeks. So keep checking back and see it evolve!

Check out the Website Design

At the moment, to celebrate the release of the website, we are offering 25% discount on our website design services until 23 May 2012.

25% discount on website design services.