Redesigning Data Labels

Yesterday our design and development team launched the redesigned Data Label website. Data Label is an asset and barcode label manufacturer and supplier. When they contacted Bronco the brief was simple “turn a now ageing and inflexible website into a modern reflection of the company that will adapt to the company’s growing future”.

The problem of redesign’s

The problem when redesigning websites such as the one for Data Label is that their existing website has gone untouched for so long. With websites that are a year or two old a redesign will mostly draw on the existing design and be more about making improvements than a complete restyle.

But as time passes it’s more difficult to build on what has come before. For Data Label we needed to start from scratch but in changing so much the danger is that too drastic a change could alienate a websites existing user base. When it was necessary to change so much we had to identify what could remain constant and thus provide that link between the old and the new.

Colour

Though in the new website we’ve scaled back the amount of colour used we have retained the use of the primary colour of the old website; blue.

In the old website blue was used heavily as the background colour for the side column as well as for the logo, text and links. The new website uses colour more sparingly to help differentiate the more important elements such as call to actions and links. We also used a deeper shade of blue for the background of the header.

Navigation

The page structure of the website has remained largely the same as the old website and so with little changing in the navigation this was designed to occupy the same positions as could be found in the old website.

This means anyone who has used and remembered the previous version of the website could come to the new website and find the content they want quickly by seeing that the links to those pages are in the same areas of the page as on the old website.

The small details

These may not seem like much in a design that has in other ways changed drastically but they provide visual indications that the new website is a refresh of what came before and not something completely different.