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.