PPM Re-Design and New Tag Line

Over the last several weeks I’ve been working on a new version of our website and was able to finally rolled it out. Its not a complete re-design, just a minor upgrade over the previous version of the site. Take a look at it here.

Here’s what’s changed:

• Left Nav Removed: All navigational elements are now encompassed in the drop down. Any sub-navs are found in the body on the pages to which they are necessary. I have been wanting to get rid of the navigation for some time, and even with the last re-design I contemplated it but just couldn’t figure out how to lose that without losing usability to essential pages. A slight re-organization of our sections fixed that problem.
• Right-Side Info Panel: For the most part the “nav bar” has been moved from the left side to the right side but its been cleaned up a bit and is no longer a navigation bar. Instead of a gray background setting it apart from the body area it now is fused in with a white background. This looks much cleaner and gave me room for some cool stuff I wanted to do. More on that below
• New Top Nav Menu: The old top nav menu was justified to the right but I moved this one over to the left. Made sense since there is no left nav anymore. I also restructured our main service categories and combined some old categories into these. Instead of a “services” drop down that had about 20 links, I’ve got our main services across the top and each drop down containing six or so links. For those that browse with JavaScript turned off I made sure that the category buttons link to pages as well. That was a problem with the old site, when JavaScript is turned off the drop downs downs don’t work. Now the navigation bar still does regardless.
• Colored Nav Buttons: I added a script to swap images in the top nav depending on which section of the site you’re in. Previously, these were always black and the drawback to that is it made the top navigation difficult to locate as id kind of blended in a bit. That was another reason why I kept the left nav. But now, the buttons turn yellow for the section the visitor is in. Not only does it make it immediately apparent that this is a navigation menu, it helps letting visitors know where they are in the site.
• Rotating Testimonials: I always liked having testimonials visible but putting them in the nav bar made them static. I’ve changed that by putting the testimonials in the right-side information column and adding a script that pulls a new testimonial with each click or refresh. I also added some stats to rotate in and out of here as well just for a more rounded experience. Below the testimonials is a link to read more which takes visitors to the testimonial page.
• BBB Membership: I’ve made my Better Business Bureau membership more visible. This is an important usability issue and helps give visitors some confidence. Instead of being lower on the page it is now prominently displayed at the top.
• Updated Footer: I updated the footer to be consistent across all pages. Previously the four images were only on select pages but I incorporated these into the site wide footer. This also allowed them to spread out across the entire bottom of the page rather than just as wide as the body area. I like this better.
• New Tag Line: I felt it was time for a new tag line. The old, which I liked very much, was “Position Your Business First”. A nice play on words with positioning and the meaning of “Pole Position”. This time I wanted something a bit more aggressive and many ideas were bantered around. Ultimately I settled on one I like very much, “Velocitize Your Web Marketing”.

  Tag lines can be hit and miss. Like I said, I really like this new one, but what do you think? Did we hit?