Inspyre

We’ve just launched our own site, and we’d love to give you the tour. Let’s start at the top, literally.

Flash

Our header was designed on good old-fashioned paper and then digitized using Flash 8. Ryan, our design guru, is skilled at creating both motion graphics—as shown here– and interactive Flash web sites. Generally, our take is that Flash is the cherry on top. It can elevate a site with some “wow” factor, but the sundae, I mean site, should be delicious on its own. We want to push information as far as it can go, so the bulk of our site (and potentially yours) is coded in standards compliant XHTML and CSS. For the end-user, this means the most accessible content possible. In any major browser whether on a large-screened desktop computer or a portable handheld device, you can view this website.

Menus and Site Architecture

Although we have a simple site (4 pages & a blog), we still planned carefully. Creating a website involves organizing information in an effective manner so that users can grasp relevant information quickly. In our case, we felt that our blog isn’t crucial information to our average visitor; it’s something extra for those who are looking to learn more about us personally. Thus, it has no place in the main navigation and is only accessible indirectly through the news feed on our home page.

Content

We intend to update our content often both through blogging and by keeping our portfolio up to date. To make things easy on ourselves, we’ve implemented a content management system (CMS), and created our own template that matches the style of our site. A CMS provides a user-friendly way to interact with the content of a web site. In a similar fashion to editing a normal text document, we can make changes to our website—instantly. We can create or implement these systems for you, or if you’d rather we just take care of everything, we can handle all of your site maintenance needs.

Sidebar

Our sidebar shows abbreviated content: news snippets, bulleted lists, and meta information (information about the information). It also shows off some neat Javascript coding effects. Advanced Javascript allows for a sophisticated user interface that can be expanded on to make interactive tools and applications.

Footer

Alright you’ve got us there—pretty boring. But we’re always learning, teaching ourselves through study and practice. This is just the beginning.