Manufacturing a Redesign
for Software Factory

• By Gary W. Priester

• Before: The current Software Factory Web page is clean and laid out on a high-tech gray grid. The overall design is rather nice. How can I make this design better?
• The contenders: I produced five site designs for the client to choose from and posted them on-line for his review.
• The next round: Two sets of revisions were made to the selected design and the logo animation was improved.
• The final design: The final design reflects the client's requested modifications and the addition of nine illustrations.

When is a factory not a factory?

Writing for efuse.com has its benefits. My editor is so busy editing the efuse site that he often has no time to do design work for his former clients. So when his client, Software Factory, a German consulting company, requested a site update, my editor had to recommend another talented designer. Me!

My new German client, Peter, gave me a briefing via e-mail. Peter is fluent in English which is fortunate as my German is virtually non-existent. Peter requested the final site design be a NetObjects Fusion 4.0 template file. Peter, and his staff, will be responsible for updating the site and translating the content. And as I write for efuse, and use NetObjects Fusion as my Web site-creating software of choice, what could be better?

Software Factory, as it turns out, was not Peter's first choice of names for the company. Peter initially wanted to call his company Factory 2000. Not because his company manufactures anything, because it doesn't, but certain English words, such as factory, sound cool in German. The local Chamber of Commerce, however, rejected Factory 2000. One member of the chamber even went so far as to suggest that Factory 2000 sounded like the name of an abattoir! So Peter came up with Software Factory which was acceptable.

Software Factory was founded in 1997 as part of Group Gelbes Haus (Yellow House Group), and was primarily involved with Y2K-projects. Its first clients were banks, insurance companies and air traffic control companies. Today the company still works on Y2K solutions as well as Air Traffic, Mainframe Maintenance, projects developed for SAP (a German software giant), and Project Management.

Before

I visited Software Factory's site. It was spare and cleanly designed and laid out with plenty of white space on a pale gray grid. The handsome logo, designed by my efuse editor, Daniel Will Harris, is in the upper left and positioned over various photographic image/buttons. As the site is in Germany, the text is mostly in German.

Peter sent me a revised table of contents for the site in English. I asked for the English table of contents titles to be translated into German. Peter informed me that most of the new section names would still be English. He explained in the German IT business, English words and phrases sound more high tech. This made sense. In the United States, German, French, Italian and Spanish words are often used for the same reason.

My challenge was to build on the current site's look and feel while at the same time updating the overall design to reflect the company's growth as it moves into the next phase of its business. I liked the spare, uncluttered feeling the site had and decided to maintain this openness in my designs.

Some designers like to start a project by roughing out designs on paper which is a fine way to work. I, on the other hand, like to open up XARA, the vector software I use to create most of my Web graphics, and just start creating things. I guess this is like computerized doodling. Things then turn into backgrounds, buttons, and other related objects. Once I have some objects I like, I bring them into NOF and start arranging them and rearranging them until I'm happy with the way the objects are interacting with the page design. I also like to have the elements on the page visually relate to the nature of the company, product or service of the site I'm designing.

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