Welcome to our new website!

We’re delighted to have launched our new website!

Over the past couple of months we’ve been hard at work on a new design which we think represents a real improvement over our previous website. Here’s a quick run-down of the new features and upgrades we’ve made:

Colour scheme

We’ve created a memorable style with the new design and we hope it will set us apart from other web design agencies in and around North Yorkshire.

As you can see above, the old site had quite a dark and gloomy background, and whilst we love the rich green colour we felt the whole page needed brightening up. The new site sits on a mostly white background which makes it clean and open and easy to read.

We love our rural location (we’re based in Riccall, just south of York), so we’ve kept the green farmland and bright blue sky from our old site. This all ties neatly into our stylised mill logo and the other graphics on the site.

The bright orange you see in our logo makes a frequent appearance on links and other ‘clickable’ things – this is a great way of drawing attention to important elements on the page.

Graphics and illustrations

We’ve chosen a distinctive and colourful hand-drawn style for our illustrations to match our logo and show off our graphic design skills. All the graphics on the site have been hand-drawn by Nick Pearson (one of our in-house graphic artists). They were then scanned in and meticulously edited using Photoshop to tidy them up and prepare them for the website.

We’ve also kept the moving clouds from our old site – if you have a screen wide enough you’ll see them floating across the background behind the site content. The clouds require something of a technical feat to pull off – each cloud runs on a ‘track’ that’s timed and set off at different speeds so they’re never in quite the same configuration. If you hang around long enough you might spot something else in the clouds, too – but we’re not going to spoil the surprise here – you’ll just have to wait and see!

Features and content

Our new site is much larger than the old one – a reflection of how much we’ve grown in the last couple of years. We’ve added separate pages for each of the services we offer, so we’re a bit more visible for our key services – website design and development.

We’ve also taken the time to talk about ourselves, what (we think) makes us worth hiring, and to list a few FAQs – give us a shout if you think of anything we’ve missed.

Our portfolio now includes separate pages for a handful of recent projects, giving us an opportunity to show off the work we’re so proud of.

The new blog section will prove extremely handy for news and updates on our services – we also plan to post more in-depth case studies of our favourite website projects in future. Watch this space!

The nuts and bolts

We’ve built the new site around the WordPress CMS engine, mainly thanks to the control this gives us over the inner workings of the site. It also helps that we frequently work using WordPress as one of our preferred content management systems.

The new site doesn’t use any Flash – we’ve moved entirely onto alternative technology for our galleries (jQuery). This is mainly so those visitors with iPads and iPhones can browse the site without missing all the good stuff.

We’re pleased to be able to implement some of the features of the latest up-to-date code (HTML5 and CSS3) in building our new website, but as ever our focus is in making sure that the site is attractive, functional and easy to use. Hopefully you agree with us!

In conclusion

The new website represents the latest stage in our repositioning exercise, which is now taking place.

Over the past few years we’ve been hard at work building up our sister company, Phosys, to focus on website design for photographers. Hundreds of photographers now use the Phosys system to manage their websites and sell images online and the brand is going from strength to strength.

Over the coming months we will be building The Cybermill to focus specifically on servicing businesses by offering premium creative digital services. The Cybermill has been established for over 10 years – we build bespoke websites and applications for small-medium sized business in and around York and Yorkshire, as well as further afield.

We’d love to hear your comments about the new website – you can send these in using the form below.

Posted on 11th November 2011 in News, The Cybermill, Websites