We have learned our lesson.

We run a website for raw food recipes and discussion, called Gone Raw. It’s been up for three and a half years now - originally as a custom-built Rails application, then in Drupal. And while we’ve always enjoyed running the site, our biggest issue has been that it felt slow.

We’ve long felt that the speed of a website is more important than most people assume. Fred Wilson recently gave a great talk on 10 Golden Principles for Building Successful Web Applications in which his very first item was speed. I’m just going to quote him here directly.

First and foremost, we believe that speed is more than a feature. Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it. I see this more with mainstream users than I do with power users. I think that power users sometimes have a bit of sympathetic eye to the challenges of building really fast web apps, and maybe they’re willing to live with it, but when I look at my wife and kids, they’re my mainstream view of the world. If something is slow, they’re just gone.

So true. And when Wilson refers to a “web application,” I would extend this to all websites. There’s not much difference.

I won’t go into the technical details, but we decided this week to move Gone Raw to the latest-and-greatest Drupal-based hosting technology. Our goal was to make it faster. And it is - on average, a visitor sees pages load five times faster! That’s nothing to sneeze at. In fact, once you’re browsing around the site, the pages often load so fast you would miss them if you blinked.

That’s more like it. Though Gone Raw is a free site, it depends in part on advertising revenue to stay worthwhile to us. And more visitors, with faster pages, is only going to help. We can’t wait to use this great technology on more of our websites in the future.

Congratulations to the folks at Dolcezza artisanal gelato on the opening of their third store. If you are in DC this weekend, this is a grand opening not to miss.

Congratulations to Saint Cupcake for their newly launched Saint Cupcake Deluxe shop. Not only can you still get mouthwatering cupcakes at the shop, but they’re also now selling carefully curated party supplies and specialty gift items.

we’ve worked hard to bring you the most unique, fun, (often) locally hand-crafted party supplies around. to put it simply, our selection of party supplies and gifts match our cupcakes: they’re perfect. add to that a staff that will work hard to make your party planning & decorating dreams come true…and you’ll soon realize we are your only choice for celebrations. now you can get your favorite cupcakes AND everything you need for the perfect party all in one place.

We hope you enjoy the shop’s new web page as well!

It seems like just yesterday that we were announcing the birth of Portland’s newest little designer. Well, we just spent the weekend celebrating little miss Zoë‘s first birthday. My, how time flies!

Thanks to all our amazing friends, family, and clients who made this year (and this celebration) so remarkable.

Digging this simple site - can you spot Needmore? (via Amy Ruppel)

By the time you read this, we will be in Mexico. But that’s okay - we’ve earned this one! We’ve been working our little designer fingers to the bone here in Portland, trying our best to ignore the lovely March weather. And trust us, the weather is probably even lovelier where we are, busily recharging our batteries and getting ready for April. Read more in our newsletter...

We’ve just launched a redesigned website for Cooke Orthodontics. Based out of Napa, California, Dr. Mary Cooke and her team have us contemplating visits to wine country for our dental needs (read more). The website, originally a static site in Flash, is now fully in HTML, easy to update and integrated with various forms and a newsletter.

Before

After

We’ve just launched a website redesign for Cynthia Barrett, a local Portland attorney. Cynthia works with special needs families, elders, domestic partnerships, and estate planning. One step into her office and you realize what a thoughtful, empathetic person Cynthia is. We wanted to bring this sense of experience and calm to Cynthia’s website redesign.

Original Website

Redesigned Website

We had a blast creating this website for a number of reasons:

• We were forward thinking. It was built very much with modern standards in mind. The website should validate as HTML5 already, and uses many CSS3 enhancements. The subtle effects don’t cause problems in IE6 because they aren’t necessary for visitors, they’re just enhancements.
• The site was built in Photoshop based on the 960.gs framework. Once the site was approved by the client, we grabbed the few necessary original graphics from PS, then quickly built the layout in HTML.
• Because it uses a pre-built grid system, it was easy to keep the basic layout intact even in older browsers. We could relax and design as others have already done the gritty browser testing for us. Sure enough, when we ran the site through our battery of tests, there was only one single layout problem to be corrected.
• Template files were written individually and only as necessary. We didn’t feel, for example, that an archives page was necessary. However, we did want to be sure a good ‘404’ page was there, to catch people who have a bad link. The page includes a search feature, to help guide lost visitors.
• It was a joy to build the site in WordPress 2.9. We’ve been studying WordPress for the past few weeks, and it’s making a lot of sense. It’s quite surprising the number of different projects that can be done entirely in this system.
• While building the site, we included the jQuery javascript library in the header, but never ended up needing it. The few effects that it does use are all from newer CSS. And there are few. This is a website for a lawyer, so we didn’t feel as though too much of that was appropriate.

We do hope you enjoy.

We have just wrapped up a round of improvements on the Savoir Flair website and are looking forward to seeing what they have in store for the fashion world this year. One of our favorite parts of working with this website has been the ability to work with the beautiful illustrations of Bella Pilar. Bella’s illustrations and hand-lettering are dotted throughout Savoir Flair and give the online magazine a distinctive fun fashion identity. We’ve become big fans of her work (you can even now find her t-shirts at Target).

Congratulations to our friends over at Saint Cupcake for their write-up in Friday’s Daily Candy. Perfect timing for announcing their new Saint Cupcake Takes Flight shop where customers are able to order cupcake decorating kits of 3, 6 or 12 cupcakes (which we coincidentally launched Friday as well).