Or, to put it another way, do you shop at Amazon.com because of the clever, cryptic navigation or because you can buy things without thinking too hard about the process? Do you keep returning to Wikipedia because of the massive homepage animation with the “click here to skip” button that appears every time you visit, or because you can go straight to the information you’re looking for? The user’s efficiency counts, no matter what kind of site you run.

Part of my responsibility at Hile Design is making the sites we build work (in both the user experience and technical senses of “work”), and as of now that includes our own website. Every feature, page and behavior on our new website has been brought up, shot down, reviewed, considered, revised and reconsidered before being added. On the agenda from the beginning, though, was a way to allow any user to browse our portfolio on their own terms rather than ours. I pushed hard to ensure that as little as possible gets in the way of what you’re looking for. We might be a design and marketing shop, but usability is as vital a part of marketing as the appearance.

Currently our portfolio can be browsed either by what we’ve done or who we’ve done it for. So if you are looking to see the packages we’ve designed you can find all our packaging work grouped together. If you are in the education sector, you can view, all on one page, the work we’ve done for your peers. In the future, if other organizational methods become popular we can accommodate those as well. We hope you like everything we’ve done, but above all we hope you find what you want easily.

Translating the design to the web also presented a technical challenge. Layouts follow a gridlike pattern, allowing us to rearrange elements and position them as needed while always staying true to the website’s look-and-feel. But on the administrative side, this could easily have led to requiring the editors to manage up to six or seven individual content modules per page (one for the picture, one for the description, one for the testimonial…)—equivalent to creating six Word documents for every email you send. To get around this and make life easier for the people managing the site I’ve created a mechanism that allows us to edit entire pages from within a single window, through the use of a little shorthand: Any portfolio page, for example, includes comments visible only to the editor that indicate what portfolio image is to be used and where it goes on the page. The CMS does the rest.

Ours is a site with a lot of graphics and Flash, so it may sound odd that we work hard to keep its navigation as efficient as possible. But it does you no favors to wait forever for every page to load, and that’s as true for a small site like ours as for a big site like Google’s. So optimizing the HTML, graphics, and backend programming has been a mandate for this project. I hope we met that goal as well; the loading time for pages full of artwork is better than many websites’ default content, optimizing everything we can without sabotaging the appearance or user experience. And I’ll be continuing to work on improvements that make the site load faster and run faster, things you will only notice if they fail.

This is one of the most technically challenging projects I’ve taken on, and I’m happy with the results. We’re using the Joomla content management system for this site, and a couple of the modifications I’ve developed are being reused on upcoming sites for our clients. Some of the technical details are worth sharing, but you’ll have to read elsewhere for that. In the meanwhile, let me know what you like and, above all, what I can improve.