We Have a New Website (Finally)
Way back in August 2006 we launched a holding page for Dave Hall Consulting. Then in early 2007 we launched the real Dave Hall Consulting website on Drupal 4.7. The site and logo were designed by imgageffect.
Since that time little changed with the website. The site evolved a little over time. There were quick and dirty upgrades to Drupal 5 and 6. In 2019 we stripped the design back to make it more mobile friendly.
Over the last 5 years there have been multiple plans to fix the site. They all failed, most due to lack of time and/or focus. In September 2020 we decided it was time to fix the site. Instead of doing it in house, we leaned on our years of experience managing remote and out sourced teams. We searched for the best people to deliver our new site.
After an extensive search we settled on One Week Wonders Studio. We couldn’t be happier with the results. We worked closely with the OWW team throughout the process. The communication was excellent. They understood the image we wanted to project and they provided a logo and design that fitted the brief. We have no reservations about using them again.
We prepared a brief for the logo including the general concept. The new logo incorporates the business name, while being a valid domain. We retained the orange and green from the original logo but went with stronger shades. The “/>” on the end references HTML and a command prompt.
The new website design is fresh and modern. With more white space and clean illustrations we hope the new site is more engaging. It now works better on all devices. It’s a shame that most people will never see our new 404 page which we love.
OWW didn’t have experience building Hugo sites. That wasn’t a problem. We engaged Ahmad Muhardian to take care of that for us. He did a great job delivering to our high standards. If you need someone to turn HTML into a Hugo theme, Ahmad is your person. He also does some awesome manga art.
We consider this iteration our minimum lovable product. Comments will be back in a future version of the site. More content is in the pipeline too. Hugo makes it easier for us to focus on the content, rather than the CMS and the underlying stack. This makes it easier for us to iterate and push out new content.
When rebuilding the site we wanted to adopt a principle of respecting users privacy. We use Netlify Analytics so your visits here aren’t added to your aggregated Google data profile. We host the fonts for the same reason. Youtube and most other embeds are links, rather than rich content. These privacy respecting features allowed us to implement a simple Content Security Policy.
Once again the builder no longer has the worst looking house in the street.