Have you heard about Eleven2? Well, 1WD has been hosting with them for almost a year now! How is it? Well, you can see it yourself – site is working fast and we rarely have any problems now! If you have ever owned internet business I bet you know how crucial is to have a great hosting provider with good support. I’ve been lucky to get to Eleven2, they are really reliable! I would even say 24/7 support is the most crucial part, because there are always times when something goes wrong and without immediate attention, you may loose more than you imagine to your branding!

Long story short, Eleven2 just relaunched their business, redesigned their website, added different plans improving greatly and today I am sharing their story with you! And be quick to get your free hosting account – only 100 packages available!!!

Eleven2 Story

January the 3rd is when we launched our new website design. It had taken 5 months to build, starting from the beginning of August 2010. Originally, we wanted to have the whole site done by September 21st, but that deadline came and went, as we continued to find aspects in our design that we wanted to change and improve, thus bringing us forward to the end of the year, and seeing as January is our biggest month, we thought we could enter 2011 with a brand new site!

Comparing the oldsite to our brand new current site, the oldsite was a lot more bland (colour wise), and used 100% widths, where as our newsite all fits perfectly within our 940px container, and everything is aligned perfectly to the user has a great experience when browsing our site. Check out the homepage of our oldsite, compared to the brand new homepage on our newsite…

(old website design)

(new website design)

Where Did We Improve?

We wanted to create a new website that focused on the end user, making the user interface easy to use, and making it easy for the customer to find information about any of our services! To do this we decided to split our site into sections with pages underneath it. We implemented an Ajax dropdown menu to do this…

We also have redesigned out back-end billing panel, so that clients can manage all their domains, hosting and services with us easy and efficiently. This was thanks to Jon Eichler who spent ages battling with WHMCS.

I am extremely proud of our brand new all In one signup page, where users can pick their hosting type, then filter down to package and location. It uses alot of Ajax, and we put alot of work into this page.

Everything on the site has changed, including all our pricing tables. We put alot of work into research on this front, making sure all our services we're displayed beautifully, and making all the information easy to compare to other packages within that product band.

We have also added global server locations to all of our reseller packages. People can now choose where they want their server to be hosted, from London UK, Dallas Texas, and Singapore Asia. We offered this on all our shared hosting plans, so we thought it would be a good idea to add it to our popular reseller hosting too.

We also have a growing Facebook Page, Twitter Page, and our brand new blog which we are using to keep customers updated on company updates, new product launches and server issues, upgrades etc.

The New Video Tutorials Catalogue

We have also launched a brand new video tutorials catalogue with the newsite, which contains over 1,000 video tutorials all split up into sections and subcategories. We cover everything from cPanel, WHMCS to Paypal and WordPress Integration. This is another step forward to going the extra mile to our customers.

When users click on a tutorial, the video opens in a lightbox allowing for fast video toggling between each video in a series.

What's Happening Backstage at eleven2?

Behind the doors at eleven2 right now, we have so much going on, and we are all so excited to enter 2011 with all the staff on board to take eleven2 further and offer much more to our customers. With the launch of our FREE iPhone app on the iTunes App store, we also have a Google Android App in the works, and will hopefully soon go even further when the company grows and offer apps to all Major SmartPhone platforms including Symbian and Blackberry OS.

We also want to perhaps sometime before the Q2 of the year create a mobile website, and if the iPad 2 really takes off, then there will perhaps be an app for that too. It all depends on the way technology goes, and making our services more accessible to fit current trends.

The Giveaway – FIRST COME, FIRST SERVE

We are giving away 100 x Shared hosting packages FREE for 4 months! The hosting package you will be on is the S-100 package, which gives you 1GB of Storage Space and 15GB Monthly Bandwidth transfer. There is no limit on how many websites you can host too!

You can even pick where you want to be hosted. We have servers in Dallas (TEXAS), London (UK), and Singapore (ASIA).

We are giving these packages away on a first come first serve basis! There's only 100, so HURRY! All you have to do is to go the following link, click web hosting, choose your location for the S-100 plan and click signup. Remember on the checkout porcess, choose the monthly billing term, and enter the coupon 1stwebdesignerFREE.

http://www.eleven2.com/signup/

Checkout Coupon: 1stwebdesignerFREE

If you don't like us after 4 months of free hosting, you can cancel your account anytime.

If you missed out…

There are only 100 FREE accounts to giveaway on a first come first serve basis, so if you go to the checkout and the coupons have all been used up, then you can always use the coupon 1stwebdesigner to get 35% off your first payment term on any of our hosting packages! Which includes shared, reseller and cloud!

35% Off Coupon: 1stwebdesigner

I recently read an article on SixRevisions called Details Make the Difference in Web Design by Jason Gross. I thought it was a great article for the most part, but that it left out a few things and didn’t touch on the importance of making sure a design detail is actually needed. So I thought I’d expand on it a bit. I’m looking for feedback here for sure. I’m also not claiming that I have this down personally, we all need to work on some area or another. Be sure to leave your thoughts below!

The Point of Design

One of the very important things to remember is the point of our designs. We may be designing for people who rarely look at websites or people that stare at them for 10 hours+ a day. These are details that aren’t visual, but most likely just as important, if not more so. Now, I’m a designer so I love things to look pretty, but I’m also into user experience. So even if I try to make something look incredible, it has no value if it’s not usable. That’s where we need to remember the user.

Remember the User

These people are the ones that are going to be using the site moreso than we will after it launches, unless it’s a product we use of course. For the most part, we need to take into account if they understand how things work on the web, what links look like, where to find the navigation, things of this nature. Now I realize these aren’t exactly “design” elements but they are details and they are very important. So if we’re talking about details, we have got to remember the user, what they’re looking for, how they will get there and lastly, will they appreciate the way it looks. Yes I know it’s hard to fathom that the actual “look” may very well come last, but for many users, they just want information and as long as they can find it, they couldn’t care less about the way it looks. Which perfectly leads me into my next point.

Pay Attention to your target audience

If you’re designing a website for an app that only runs on mac, then don’t worry about the IE users. Obviously make it look decent over there, but they will be few and far between. But if you’re working on a site that mostly businesses will use, better keep your design in IE standards, or close to it. What I mean by this is simply to pay close attention to who you know or think will be using the site the most. Make sure that your “details” make sense for that platform or even that browser and keep within the means of what your audience will understand. A website designed for middle-age business people will most likely not need the fancy jquery functions and subtle details in the design that don’t make a difference to them. And that doesn’t mean to make it ugly, but keep it simple for them, they aren’t designers who understand what HTML5, jQuery and CSS3 are. Again, not that I don’t think we shouldn’t push these technologies so that the web advances as it should, but be aware of your audience and don’t make them think too hard…it makes some people’s head hurt.

Details Details Details

Ah, now for the amazing details in design you’ve all been waiting for. I go back to Jason’s post once again and think about what he mentioned there. He said

The type of details we want to spend extra time on improves our work beyond the aesthetic levels.

And while I 100% agree with him that spending the extra time on details is necessary, I’m honestly not sure his examples proved that point all that well. Removing a line or changing the active state of a navigation element doesn’t necessarily reflect poorly on the overall user experience. From a design standpoint, yes it makes a difference, but I just don’t feel the addition of those things “improve our work beyond the aesthetic levels.” Take the following for example

The image is the same but with a few minor details changed, just like Jason did in his. But I venture to say that its is still just as usable without the detail as it is with it. Aesthetically different and uglier, but not less usable. It’s also a difference in design style as one is more flat than the other. I think you’ll agree with me here that we could all use the site on the right just as easy as the one on the left.

Now take the below as the opposite example.

This image is significantly improved with the added attention to detail in the font. Not only does it look better, it is literally easier to use simply because it’s easier to read. These are the types of details we need to pay attention to when designing. Make it look awesome of course, because that’s what we love to do, but make sure it’s usable over everything else. Take note that I purposely did not change anything except the font to further prove my point that I mentioned above. We all tend to think of “the details” as a line or shadow, but remember they can even be something as big as a font choice, colors, line height, positioning and many other aspects of a design.

The Big Question Here

So, the question that we’re trying to answer here is this. Does a design become less effective without the details? I can see where it might, for instance, for a web designer. If I have a portfolio that doesn’t display the details of my work or show that I pay attention to detail, my site becomes less effective because the potential client looking at it deems I’m not worthy of working with the level of detail they need.

On the other hand, I would say in some instances it doesn’t matter. The design is still usable. It still looks good, though not when compared with the better looking version. And it still functions the way it should, or at least we hope it does. So in this sense I would say it can be just as effective.

AND…Finally

Some of the simplest designs are the ones that catch our attention the most. Designs that get too “detailed” can cause over stimulation on where to look and what to focus on. Don’t fall prey to that. Pay attention to the details, but never overdo them. Make it a point to go back through your design and remove anything that doesn’t add “value” to the overall design. Overall, remember that you’re the professional, whether it’s doing work for yourself or a client and you need to make the call on what needs to be there and what does not. Stand up for awesome designs everywhere and make that commitment now.