Elphicks Fisheries Case Study
Gone fishing – Redesigning the Elphicks Fisheries Website
The Fishery “Management” are very pleased with this website redesign, but since the old site is no longer live for comparison, we grabbed a couple of screen shots so that we can illustrate the redesign process.
This image shows how the site was constructed. The first thing we noticed was that it used the dreaded frames method, and that the News Flash box contained an unnecessary and distracting Flash animation, and finally there was a conflict between the masculine image of a man with a big fish anchored bottom right of the window and a girly colour palette of lilacs.
But that wasn’t all... Trouble was, if you were viewing the site with your browser set to 800x600, this is what you’d see:
The welcome text flowed over the image anchored at the bottom right of the frame containing the content obscuring the image and rendering the text pretty illegible.
Worse still, users had complained that they were not able to see all the menu items. At smaller screen sizes the items at the bottom of the menu were hidden off-screen and it wasn’t immediately obvious that the menu area scrolled separately to the main page as it was placed in a separate frame. This rendered parts of the site inaccessible to some users.
We re-drew the logo and used a more “fishy” colour palette for both that and the website. We moved the navigation from vertical to horizontal, so that it would be visible on every page, and the magic of CSS allowed it to be fixed without resorting to frames.
We gave the content structure an overhaul to make it flow more logically and added a few extra images around the site to break up long pages of text. We re-drew the maps on the contact page, added some accommodation links and last but not least, the images in the gallery are now linked to pages containing larger images allowing for better print quality for that all‑important pub‑bragging session.
We’re very glad that this was one job that didn’t get away (pun intended!) because we really wanted to make the site better for everyone. You can see the difference for yourselves at Elphicks Fisheries’ website.
Update
The new site receives many thousands more page impressions per week than the old one and has reduced telephone calls to the fishery since most of the information callers were seeking is readily available on the site.
The Fishery has been so impressed with its performance that it has reallocated almost all of its marketing budget to the site! The rest of the budget has been allocated to producing a glossy new leaflet that also includes some Frog Box Designed maps.
