Designer: Ashley Haffner
Capturing the enthusiasm of a custom
graphics company on the web can be
challenging, as Mike Jarvis, owner and
operator of Graphics by Jarvis can
attest. “My current website looks plain
and boring,” he notes. “It doesn’t reflect the exciting
nature of my business.” He wants his company
to have a site that’s arresting and professional to
impress potential customers and increase sales and
traffic, which is why he turned to DG for a redesign.
Graphics by Jarvis has two separate divisions for
its graphics work: Car and Commercial. Designer
Ashley Haffner thinks both areas are a bit unorganized,
so she decided to give them a more unified
design. “The intro page is effective at taking people
to the two separate divisions, so I didn’t change it,”
she says. “The real problem lies in the way the two
sites are organized visually, and in the navigation. It’s
visually jarring to go from the slick black intro page
into the stark white commercial side.”
To make the sites more unified, Haffner chose a
metal theme since both divisions use it as a medium.
She gave the business side a more conservative look,
and appealed to the company’s creative audience on
the car graphics side with an edgy, urban design.
The designer addressed navigation problems
by moving links that took customers away from the
main purpose of the site—to show off its work—to
the bottom of the page, where they are still accessible
but don’t detract as much. She also included a link
to the commercial site on the car side so customers
don’t have to retype the URL to get there.
For both divisions, Haffner suggests Graphics
by Jarvis include more information on its products
and more images per page. She notes that customers
on the car side should have the ability to click into
a larger image of a particular car with more details,
and she gave the commercial site thumbnails which
could also be clicked on to give a larger view. Haffner
proposes that the company should have close-up
photographs of its work to better show off its graphics,
without models blocking the view—not that we
have anything against models.
