We launched a newly-designed Radar Media Group website late last month. The previous design was still perfectly serviceable and less than three years old. It had lots of examples of Radar's work and was fully SEO-optimized. That all said, it had a few issues that made us want to start fresh.

Making sure the new site was designed for ease of updating and maintenance was job one. Although we are writers and designers by trade, most of our waking hours are dedicated to client work. Finding time to update our own site with the latest portfolio work was always something we put off until last.

Our new site makes routine maintenance a lot faster and easier. Unlike before where we had to manually prepare multiple image files for each new entry, the new site automatically creates thumbnails from a single image and presents the work neatly in a slideshow arrangement. Like our previous site, the new site runs on a modern content management platform, so making everyday text edits and entries is a snap.

We also wanted the new site to be more socially-aware. While the Radar Media blog remains our primary means of communicating with clients and prospects, here too our creation of new blog entries sometimes took a back seat to client work. We've made a promise to update the new blog more frequently. But just in case, we've also added a realtime Twitter feed to the Radar Media homepage.

One nice thing about Twitter is that each entry is no more than 160 characters of text. That makes the challenge of coming up with fresh content a whole lot easier -- not just for us, but for millions of users worldwide. Since we now have Radar's Twitter feed prominently positioned on our homepage, that fresh content should make the entire site look more timely than before.

There's more to our redesign than just the above, of course. We hope you like the clean layout, the new Radar logo and our commitment to green energy (more than 50% of the electricity we use at Radar is from our own solar panels) and a better environment for all.

Until next time. . .