Wednesday, January 30, 2008

About 30 & Counting...

Wow... In just a few short years, Red Dream Studios has either launched from scratch, or participated in over 30 websites -- which actually means, we've succeeded in placing 30 new companies online (the majority of which are still active today). We're very proud of this and hope that in the near future, we can continue to cater to entrepreneurs who need to either place themselves on the internet, or revamp their existing online brand.

Today marked the launching of a new company, Pinstripe Coaching. Pinstripe offers coaching and training to executives and is based out of the Toronto area. In addition to the website, Red Dream Studios also developed all of Pinstripe's brand and collateral, which includes the company's logo, business cards, and stationary.



To view the Pinstripe Coaching website, visit: http://www.pinstripecoaching.com/.

For more information, visit Red Dream Studios.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Evolution of a Website

Designing, producing, and developing websites is a large part of our business at Red Dream Studios. Customer service, reliability and dependability is an even larger part. It is our advice to all entrepreneurs that relationships are built on 2 fundamental factors: Trust & Respect.

By adopting these principles, Red Dream Studios builds relationships with our clients, thereby adhereing to these famous quotes by T. Whitaker:

"It's not what you do, it's how you do it."
"They don't care how much you know, they want to know how much you care."
A case example of this happens to be with a client that has been with us since 2003. Aquatica manufactures underwater housings for digital cameras, as well as a host of other underwater photography gear. We approached them through a word-of-mouth referral and quickly landed the task of redesigning their online presence.



The original website, shown above, is a classic example of many design accidents:
  1. Inconsistent design throughout the page as well as the site
  2. Poorly flowing information
  3. Broken links
  4. Too much information below the browser's line of sight
  5. Bad navigation

So in 2003, we submitted the following redesign:



The 2003 Aquatica website made use of the latest web technologies and features: an ASP-driven dynamic catalog (for easy catalog maintenance), Flash-driven header animation of an underwater vista, a more appropriate colour palette that matched the company's offerings, and an overall cleaner, more sophisticated navigation system.

Having lasted 4 solid years, Aquatica returned to Red Dream Studios (there's that client relationship thing again) to provide a more contemporary web design for its company, in line with a slight shift in their product offerings and company's marketing direction.

In late 2007, the new Aquatica website was launched with the following design:

This design, which proves yet again that the clean, simple method usually works best, further refines the way Aquatica presented its products and services. The design focused more on the photographic results one could achieve by using Aquatica products, and sorted the Aquatica catalog into a more efficient manner. It still features a dynamic database and an interactive dealer locator map. The colour palette shifted away from the mostly blue/ocean theme to a more technical gray feel, in line with Aquatica's focus of being a more technically-oriented company, but we preserved elements of blue to still portray the company as offering products for an underwater experience.

For more information, visit Red Dream Studios.