One of the highest traffic sites we have created got a substantial update today; the site I am talking about is Vancitylofts.com. We inherited this site in 2003 in the form of a massive plate of PHP 4 spaghetti code and went through a complete rewrite in 2006. As part of the rewrite we ported the site to perl and the Catalyst web framework. Since then the site has gone through a number of random updates and feature additions and as of today, has finally been brought into the web 2.0 era.
We have implemented a number of usability enhancements and finally eliminated one of my least favourite website features ever, the pop-up. To accomplish this we have utilized carousels, sliders and baseboxes. What’s a BaseBox you ask? It is our own implementation of a modal dialogue and has been written from scratch using a new version of the wonderful jquery javascript framework (an additional article will be written on this soon). Our goal was also to simplify the site and tighten it up to make it more focused. As part of the simplification process we examined the websites analytics and removed pages that were rarely visited, as well as popular exit pages that did not fit the sites focus.
Our next task is going to be tightening up the banners, removing needless animations and use exclusive photography.
Before
Old version of homepage
Old version of listing pop-up
After
New version of home page
New listing basebox
I hope you like it!
