SignatureBar Redesign
Signaturebar is a site that’s been with us for sometime and it’s success is partly due to it’s simplicity. It targets a young market and offers a simple service absolutely free. Over the years it’s developed not only in terms of traffic but has continued to nurture a friendly and welcoming forum community.
The site was ready for not only a new look but the chance to push forward in terms of technologies used and functionalities provided. This was a project all of us were eager to work on.
How It Looked
Take a look at the screenshots below for how it looked.
What We Did
Graphically the site needed an overhaul but we didn’t want to change everything. Certainly the high contrast oranges were part of what made signaturebar different from it’s competitors. In addition despite the old mascot looking dated we didn’t want to drop him completely as once again he formed a key part of the signaturebar brand.
To kick things off we spoke to Sergio over at SOS Factory to see what he thought about converting our old spikey ball friend into something fresh and alive. Certainly the mascot of old was just a spikey shape with eyes and our vision was of something a little more human. After two weeks of concepts and ideas Sergio finally delivered both a new logo and a fantastic mascot which ultimately formed the starting point of signaturebars redesign.
The site design had to accommodate both some new sections and the colors associated with the new mascot and logo. We kept to the old fixed width layout but enhanced the backend (mainly PHP/MySQL) with a couple of new functionalities which were missing in the first implementation. Some of these include an advanced admin panel, better SEO urls and an easier to maintain templating system.
The final piece of the puzzle was the forums which in some ways was the heart of the site. The original PHPBB 2.0 implementation was great during signaturebars early days but with excessive spam problems and limited admin functionality in PHPBB 2.0 we decided to do a full migration to VBulletin instead.
The design and coding of the forums took almost 2 weeks due to the amount of data, mods and plugins that needed to be replaced, however the whole project was a big success so well worth the many hours spent.
How It Looks Now
You can check the live site over here or simply browse the screenshots below.
Great update. This definitely gave the site the look it needed to be competitive in today’s online market. Great job.