Designer: Ashley Haffner & Michael Ulrich

“We are celldivision, and this is our story …,” writes the group at celldivision: Brendan, Kelli and Misty. “For reasons that involve the FBI, we must cut out the entire middle of this story and skip to the end. Six months of pulling out hair and two bald spots later, we still had nothing from the website company [we hired]: zip, nada, no website, no proofs, no pieces, nothing.”

“It turns out the company we selected was a fraud. This ordeal made us very leary and very tired. We slept 14 days straight,” says the group. “After we awoke, we picked ourselves up, wiped the slobber from our pillow imprinted faces and found our deposit was returned in full—courtesy of our local FBI unit. … So Dynamic Graphics, here we are today standing before you, our budget blown, our pride swallowed and our website mediocre.”

After hearing celldivision’s story, designers at DG wanted to give them a site they’d love (à la “Extreme Makeover: The Home Edition” and Ty Pennington), so we brought in not one, but two designers to work on the redesign. Designer Ashley Haffner laid the groundwork: “The enter page is unnecessary. The original home page is interesting, but not very informative or engaging. It’s hard to tell what they are selling since it just says shop,” explains Haffner. “Generally, you don’t want the user to have to make multiple clicks to get what they want. They need to make the navigation more direct, and it needs to be located consistently from page to page.”

For the new site, the designers wanted a retro look—like something out of a ’70s high school science book. DG creative director Michael Ulrich chose a bold, funky orange-and-green palette. He says, “I rounded the buttons to give the site an organic feel, yet still reminiscent of science texts.” Verdana Regular was used for text within the site and Skeletor Stance was used for celldivision’s logo.

Haffner advises: “Don’t save pages as one big piece of art. Break them up into a grid with smaller pieces. It cuts down on load time and will improve picture quality.” She also recommends watermarking their designs. While small, the images could still be stolen, and celldivsion has had enough web grief.

1. Original site
The trio at celldivison, after being defrauded by a nonexistent web design firm, had a local designer build their current site. “It doesn’t give the buyer confidence in our work or products— with its poor quality, pixelated appearance and table layout,” says Kelli Elandis Ahern, director, celldivision.

2. New logo
DG creative director Michael Ulrich created a new logo with a retro, science feel. As the font Skeletor Stance (free at www.acidfonts.com) is only lower case, he had to create the E, L and D in the new logo.

3. Fonts
For links and text, Verdana Regular is legible and scalable on screen.

4. Colors
The new site uses happy, bright orange and a cool, slick green. The color duo help reach celldivision’s target audience of young, urban, fun spirited folks who don’t take life too seriously. “We market to anyone who likes to laugh … seriously,” says Ahern.

5. Home page
“We highlighted the group’s various talents on the home page by picking a piece from each of their merchandise areas,” says Haffner. “Normally, I would suggest showing a picture of the Thou Shalt Not Street Race candle, but the quality of the one on their site was too poor.” Stock car illustration, image 23305555, Dynamic Graphics, www.jupiterimages.com

6. Watermarks
Haffner recommends adding watermarks to the art and photos on the site: “Although print quality would be low, someone could still use their stuff without permission.”

7. Navigation
“Things were getting lost due to a lack of structure and a busy background [in the original site],” says Haffner. Pages were also reorganized in the website redesign for easier navigation.

8. T-shirt page
The group at celldivision makes and sells a number of products and services at the site. Haffner recommends using better imagery of their products. For the T-shirt page, she provides more incentives to purchase—by enlarging images of products via a mouse-over, links to highlight the artists, a free shipping promo and an “e-mail to a friend link” to increase site exposure.