DataPro Design – Homepage Prototypes
A quick look at some of the homepage prototypes I created at DataPro International.
In December of 2013 it was decided that DataPro’s homepage could use a bit of a refresh. No major changes were sought, just a modernizing of the look. The homepage had long been a victim of a “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, but the opportunity to address that, at least in part, was something I wanted to capitalize on. As a reference point, when I started generating prototypes for the page, this is what it looked like:
The original page was a mishmash of coding styles and practices. There were tables within tables within tables within tables, sections that were bits of code from the original website (all-caps tags, <FONT> tags, etc.), sections that used properly indented code while others had no indenting at all, and it had a fixed width of, if I recall correctly, 782px, so in a narrow window or on the right device it was incredibly annoying to use. The code style issues were partly a function of the template system being used, which was a series of nested HTML files. The page that was eventually served definitely worked, but behind the scenes it was barely intelligible. Below is a gallery of what were originally static templates, made by hand, where I attempted to utilize a lot of what made the homepage look the way it did, but also give it a cleaner and more modern look. Deploying any one of the prototypes would have also cleaned up the code base, but when the refresh finally launched it borrowed a couple of elements in my designs without using any of them whole-hog.
