We've given the site yet another great new look, which Paul and I worked hard on for weeks. We wanted to do two things with the redesign. First, we wanted to get rid of the overly black site, which I'm sure is the more contraversial of the changes we made. We're going to probably tweak the colors some more from here, but we like the new look.
Second, we wanted to move our news to a blog area, and have a better homepage with big images and some cool effects. I think we hit that out of the park! If you've got any feedback on the new site look and feel, please let us know! It's a work in progress, so expect more changes in the future.
Also, we introduced two new products - pedal straps and the micro bag. They're both great products, and we're happy to have them in our lineup.
We've quietly added a new feature on the site, a Custom Items page where we can showcase some of our custom created bags and other goods. Right now it only has a single item, but we're going to be adding a bunch more really quickly before we start publicizing the page. It's been a tremendous amount of work getting this new feature on the site, but it's definitely worth it. It really lets us showcase our most interesting work, and to sell custom items directly through the website. We hope you have fun with it, and if you like it, let us know!
We just implemented search on the site. We decided to use Google to do our search for us, and we couldn't be more pleased with the results.
Other than that, we've been riding hard this summer. Last week, we were at 7 Springs, and this week we went got together a group for a 25-mile+ night ride through the Cuyahoga Valley area. Hope everyone else out there is having a good time as well! Here's Super Connector at 7 Springs:
7 Springs Super Connector Trail from DH Productions LLC on Vimeo.
Here's a rundown of what's been going on with the site lately, and what you can expect in the near future.
We've changed our javascript framework to jQuery recently, which should enable us to offer more functionality and interaction in the future. We also started incorporating jQuery UI into the site - expect us to leverage it much more in the following months. The other big thing we've done lately is that we've greatly increased the load speed of blaq design (or, in some cases, the percieved load speed). We did this by a combination of doing some things smarter and by reducing, by a significant amount, the size of many site images.
Next up, we're tackling site navigation, and repurposing the left navigation menu. We've long known that having the top and left nav menus was somewhat overkill, but we have never had much time to think about how to make them more useful. Fairly soon, we'll be rolling out changes in those areas - nothing revolutionary, though.
Our overall mantra is to make small, incremental site changes that improve the site at fairly regular intervals. If you've got any suggestions for the site, please write a comment or send us feedback, we'd love to hear from you!
We labored hard over the winter to be able to create a way to sell highly customized products to you directly, rather than via email (not that we don't love taking orders via email!). The result is what you see now on the product pages for things like the bags and whatnot. This accompanied a ton of work on the back end fixing things up, but the site is better than ever as a result.
We're rolling out some other new killer features in the coming months, along with an even better product lineup. I love what has been happening in the bag space lately - we're really starting to make a name for ourselves in that area. Thanks for keeping up with us!