centernorth launched
Last month, we were contacted by Sharon Horowitz, who needed her website redesigned so she could launch her new business—CENTERNORTH—which is a technology and infotech advisory service (CIO and other C-level executive coaching, business strategy, leadership development, partnership services, and more). She had already spent lots of time and money with one of those web-based companies (Lo ... rks—and by web-based I mean they never actually meet clients face-to-face) that design a logo for you and for a lot more money, will also design a website for you.
I always thought this particular company did decent work, at least on logos, until Sharon showed me what they’d come up with. A logo with a really weak, calligraphic font with a swoosh no less. A really crappy website—the colors were good, but the only images I liked where the ones created with her mother’s artwork, but paired with some strange smoke stuff that in no way complemented the original paintings that were used. It was in no way standards-compliant and the tabbed navigation didn’t line up properly—very odd. The content was all in, but with loads of typos and weird spacings and mystery characters. The site looked dark and heavy, even though there was white space, it just wasn’t balanced. And there was no way to add to the site without having to re-do the coding (the navigation structure was weird, anyway, and not really appropriate).
But what was good is that most of the content was written, which is 75% of the battle in getting a site up.
We met Dr. Horowitz at a coffee shop and talked about what she had in mind, how she likes a more minimal look, and she later sent me more examples of the look that pleases her. Which is a look I happen to like a great deal. Since the company is a start-up, essentially (experienced team members who’ve worked together before, but not necessarily under the umbrella of one consultancy), the site needed to be easily scalable to add more topics, news, clients, and case studies; plus they needed a way to easily add new content as they built out the resources section.
So, of course, it made sense to use a content management system and, of course, the best one for the job is Expression Engine—that’s what we used. We have more content to get in, for the resources section. I love the art on this site, and I love the airiness. I thought about a background treatment, some brushwork or a good pattern, but the artwork is so strong I think anything else would just make it look too busy. Maybe not, but I like how it turned out without it. The content is also interesting, the case studies and research. I’m looking forward to reading the other papers that are going up over the next few days. All in all, it was very easy to work with Sharon on this site—I’m glad she had a strong vision for what she wanted as it made it much easier to put together. I know there will be some twitching and tweaking over the next few days, but the cms makes that fairly easy. It’s going to be fascinating to see how the business, and the site, evolves over the next few years.
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