Courtney has an aesthetic approach very similar to ours: keep it as simple as possible. Elegeance is found in such things, but only where the simplicity is derived from distilling complexities into the most palatable and digestible of forms and formats. The short version of that sentence is: If something doesn’t need to be there it shouldn’t be there, and if you need that something, does it have to be complicated?

Most of the time to answer those questions is to work in design. In the case of Courtney Summers’ websites, we wouldn’t call it work.

Unique

We’ll always advocate that there’s room in this business for guys like us who build custom websites. Courtney’s design is a perfect example of why this is: functionally it does everything she needs it to, and design-wise it’s unique and stand-out and perfectly her own. Those things are hard to get when you look at some of the cookie cutter services and products out there. Not everyone knows PHP and CSS and Photoshop, and that’s where we come in.

V2

This theme is a version two. It’s an evolution of Courtney’s previous site that we did together. There are refinements, elements were removed and elements more appropriate for what she needs added. It’s still familiar to those who visit regularly and yet different enough to perhaps excite them about the new UI and what it offers readers. Complete re-designs are for the desperate, the misguided, and those who like whims and whimsy. Evolution is for those who see the purpose, branding, and identity of a website as something that does not need to be torn apart to be improved.

We had a great time working with Courtney again and look forward to seeing her grow and develop as young author with a bright career in front of her.

As is customary in our working process, we really want the website to reflect what the client wants, whether it be personality, style and sensibility, or services and product philosophies. Sometimes, it’s a grab-bag combination thereof. Courtney clearly identified her wants and needs, and she expressed to us her enjoyment of our capabilities to take abstract concepts and turns them into reality.

As a client, she was exemplary, providing us with all the information we needed when we needed it to keep things speedy. As much as she knew what she wanted and was very particular about the end outcome, Courtney gave us some room to experiment and to produce some different concepts that she could select from.

After hearing from Courtney that she was 99% sure she wanted the home page to be the blog page, we knew it would be a daring act to propose a different solution, one which would break from her preconceived notions on the design direction and instead offer a fresh take on not only her written works, but on website design itself.

The idea was to have her blog entries pulled out onto the splash page, and shown in large Georgia font, pull-quote style. But not just her latest post’s excerpt- the feature would allow for visitors to browse backwards through her entries in the pull-quote style, 50 words or so for each one.

With a younger target audience together with Courtney’s fun and inviting writing style, we felt it would be appropriate to showcase excerpts to draw readers in. After crossing our fingers and showing her our proposal, she shared her surprise and welcomed the addition.

Courtney also wrote a nice launch article, in which she heaped some praise on us:

“Pretty sexy, huh? It was designed and coded by the talented guys at BraveNewCode, whose work I?ve been a big fan of for some time now. They were nothing short of brilliant and a total pleasure to work with and I would highly, highly recommend them to anyone in the market for a (sexy) website. You can?t do better than BNC…

BraveNewCode’s work process sheet speaks for itself. I personally had a great experience working with them for the relaunch of courtneysummers.ca and it?s going to make me feel warm and fuzzy inside to direct people who are looking for great designers their way. Dale and Duane are very meticulous and every last bit of code that shapes this site was typed by them. They don’t mess around with pre-existing WordPress templates or icky WYSIWYG editors and leave errant bits and invisible code gremlins to clutter up space and steal server resources. The work they do is specified, careful, clean, professional and, well, sexy (bringing the sexy back was very important to me).

Over time, people have commented on how much they’ve dug the minimalism of my site. I heart minimalism. BraveNewCode was able to retain that minimalim and step it up. In fact, one thing that really stood out for me was how they went through my blog so they could get a sense of my identity and bring me a new design that didn?t look like it was meant for someone else.”

Lastly, we took the opportunity to work with jQuery on this project, an alternative to the Scriptaculous and Prototype javascript framework which both Duane and I have used extensively. We’ve been interested in jQuery for a while now, as it offers a very lightweight and powerful method for producing javascript effects. After getting our feet wet with it we hope to use it for WPtouch and other javascript-based plugin and client projects. Our initial experience with jQuery was very good- one line effects and transitions are a welcome change from the more involved code required by Scriptaculous/Prototype.

Thanks again for the opportunity to work with you Courtney we’re very proud of the final result!