Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Oooh, pretty

I've been tackling a few funky projects lately, and one of the more rewarding ones is nearly complete.

Before I left California, I asked my friend Brian to help redesign another friend's business Web site. Brian slammed out a design and e-mailed it to me, but I hadn't really had time to look at it in the months since. The other day, I buckled down and started using the template to rebuild the site.

The site is www.mediaforesight.org, home of Media Foresight Associates. This is the consulting business of which I am officially an associate, although I haven't been able to offer many services since the big move. Rich Somerville, the president, has been a close friend since my college days, when he hired a shaggy-haired Griner to be a research associate at New Directions for News (now defunct).

Rich then moved out to California, where he hired me to be his city editor while he was editor of The Union. Rich was a great boss, and I was excited to see his consulting business take off at the beginning of this year. When I left The Union, he hired me on as a consulting associate with the firm, and we hope to make it more than a ceremonial position in the coming months.

Anyway...on to the pretty stuff.

Here are some before-and-after links so you can see what I was able to do with Brian's design:
  1. Before: Front page
  2. After: Front page
  3. Before: Who We Are
  4. After: Who We Are
  5. Before: Articles and White Papers
  6. After: Articles and White Papers
  7. Before: What People Say About Us
  8. After: What People Say About Us

I hope you guys like the new design. I think it better reflects Rich's level of professionalism and skill, and it's a really flexible, crisp look that will work well for quite a while. What do you think?

Rich and I are also getting a blog going for him to keep folks posted on trends and news in the journalism industry. I'll obviously drop a link to it when it's ready to go. Oh, and it'll probably replace the Newstradamus feature on the front page, so don't be surprised if that doesn't look like it benefitted from the redesign.

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