A TwinFish Retrospective

Thought it would be good to share a little about the design of our site and to show how the design has progressed (in our eyes at least!!) over the last couple of years.

The original version of the site was launched not long after TwinFish Design was born as a company. Technically it was a mix of css, html and tables. Using Dreamweaver and Fireworks to put the site together was (mostly) a pain-free process. The navigation design was chosen to reflect the squares that feature in the full version of our logo. The navigation also made use of Fireworks menu feature.

Due to the Bi-lingual nature of TwinFish the original site was split into two version - english and french. This meant coding the site up twice - made easier using Dreamweaver templates.

The ‘fish’ also made their debut on the original version. Not particularly grand by any means, a simple flash animation added a certain ‘quirkiness’ that has been tamed a little now.

The first site was static - ie. any updates had to be done through Dreamweaver and then uploaded to the server via FTP. This made the portfolio a little time consuming to update - so much so that we didn’t.

Version 2 of TwinFish Design was a much bolder effort. Featuring full CSS / XHTML code running on a CMS (Textpattern), the site served our needs much better. The trickiest feature at the time was the graded navigation bar! Again, the site was Bi-lingual and was split over two sites. It was at this point that we realised how unproductive this actually was in practice.

Version 2 also featured a blog or journal. This was managed as a sub-site, but without the language split. It’s at this time we discovered comment spam…

At this point we were using CSS and XHTML in client sites and could see the benefits. Putting a list of what we wanted out of version 3 of the site was a long, but productive process. Near the top of the list was a flexible and easy to update portfolio section. Now, with version 3 of the site (the one you are looking at!) the whole site is dynamic - running on the ever so fantastic Expression Engine. Also, by combining english and french means that we only have to update one version of the site!

As for the ‘fish’, well we’ll see…