As the all-too-familiar adage goes about the shoemaker’s children, 76design had spent much too long neglecting our site to the point where it was becoming an embarrassment to the company. Outdated, stale and offering very little to the user, our site was nowhere near a reflection of the company it was supposed to represent. Something had to change and the time was long overdue. But enough about the past. I’d like to talk about the future - or at least what has recently become the present.

We’ve launched a new version of the 76design website and while it certainly was a long time coming, I’m glad we did it when we did. Obviously the timing coincided nicely with the relaunch of our partner company’s website, but I think with the help of some of the newer members to the team we came up with a solution that really outshined anything we could have come up with even a year ago.

It certainly was a long journey getting here (try to remember a time when 100% Flash sites were somewhat in fashion) so I thought I’d use this opportunity to offer a tiny insight into what we did, how we did it, and (most importantly I think) why we did it the way we did…

The home page seems like a logical place to start so let’s take a look at how we arrived at the current incarnation. For a long time during the redesign process we had planned to use the home page as a place to house our portfolio - a showcase of our past work. It wasn’t until fairly late in the game that we had a collective epiphany (brought on by some good advice from Joe) about how we could make much better use of the space to establish and communicate 76design’s unique position.

The problem that we had created for ourselves was that a portfolio - while very important for a design agency - is by nature focused on the past. Work we’ve done. That’s not necessarily what somebody encountering us for the first time is most concerned with. A portfolio essentially demonstrates competence - something which most clients would assume that all design agencies have… at a minimum. To dedicate our home page (a visitor’s first impression of us) to flaunting that would have been selling ourselves short. What we realized is that the home page needs to tell people what we’re about. You know, how we look at things differently and how our unique perspective influences how we do things. In a nutshell, starting a discussion about where we can take you rather than boring you with stories about where we’ve been. Taking the focus off us and putting it on you. I guess you could say it’s the “Web 2.0″ approach vs. “Web 1.0″.

The home page we ended up launching with accomplishes a lot more than a portfolio ever could have. It tells you who we are, what we do and what makes us special. It shows you that we get social media - by showcasing our own twist on creating conversations online around collaboration. It’s fun and playful and we hope it welcomes you to our corner of the web.

How does it work? Well, the whole concept is based around a quasi-product that we call “bored of cork”. I say “quasi” because we haven’t launched it publicly yet - even as a beta. It’s going to come soon but if you’re curious I’ll just say that the public version pretty much gives you a personalized version of what you see on our home page… kind of. It’s a space where you can post notes to yourself: reminders, to-do lists, grocery lists, phone numbers, websites, passwords - anything you want to remember and have at your fingertips. It’s your personal space and you can do whatever you like with it. We’ve designed it to be as dead-simple and easy-to-use as humanly possible and we’re just so darn excited to get people using it, as it will be the first offering from 76labs, our playful alter-ego that likes to experiment and try new things.

Oh, and don’t worry. We didn’t lose the portfolio on our new site. We just put it where it belongs.