Hope that wasn’t too much of a shock and you can find your way around. It was a spur of the moment decision to redesign but the reasons were solid.
Read on to find out why
Firstly, our previous website was designed ten years ago to facilitate off-the-shelf modular purchase of the software. That meant that we needed all sorts of different page formats to guide our purchasers through what they might need without having to phone us up. It got very complicated and we ended up talking on the phone anyway – sometimes it’s just easier that way. The website still did some of the jobs we needed but we knew it was ‘over spec’.
We also realised that none of the magic5 systems out there are the same. Even within the same industry, you all use them differently. That doesn’t mean that our ‘starter packs’ aren’t helpful but we always find that, within a few weeks, one or two things need adding, removing or changing. Therefore, the website purpose is much more of a ‘shop window’ than a selling platform.
Shiny new server
Every so often we need to upgrade the magic5 server to make sure all the latest software is available for efficiency and security. Sadly the latest upgrade was not being very friendly to the old website and we kept getting errors and messages telling us that things no longer worked that way. We had to chose between reverting to older software or rebuilding the website and, on balance, we opted for better efficiency/security and the opportunity to address some of the concerns mentioned above.
Hopefully we’ve learnt enough from the old website to retain the useful bits (like accessing the software, latest news and help text) whilst streamlining some of the navigation. Please let us know if there was something you used to find useful that hasn’t found it’s way across.