From blog to website

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Part I – Design philosophy

At TermCoord, we perform a large variety of tasks, and if you are an avid follower of our website, you may have read the recent article on the tasks of a TermCoord trainee. For the past few weeks, we have been working on a facelift for the TermCoord website, giving it a much cleaner and more professional feel. So in order to get all of you, dear viewers and visitors, up to speed, you will receive three parts in this series before we launch our new website.

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So what led to the decision to make a change? Basically a string of consecutive events, but there were two main driving forces. First, that the blog was (and still is) doing extremely well based on the statistics of this year, having allowed us to attain an important milestone of reaching over 200.000 visitors. Second, that with an ever-expanding audience, the demand for content increases as well, which means more space is needed.

What can visitors expect when they visit our new website for the first time? First of all, we have the content slider on our homepage which display the four latest posts that have been published. The reason why we opted for this solution instead of a static page with posts was to reduce the amount of clutter on our website, and the content slider is just one of many things we have used to achieve that goal.

Another thing that is likely to grab the attention of our regular visitors is the homepage itself, as the posts we publish do not appear on the homepage anymore. With the content slider and an archive in place, adding another medium of displaying posts would simply result in too many duplicates on one page.

Without a static page with published articles in place, we have the opportunity to place there something new. So in order to stick to our design philosophy, the homepage of our website displays four icons with descriptions, and to keep this thing fresh, it will get updated several times throughout the year (for example, traineeships will be displayed if applications open up, or glossaries being displayed if a recent update took place). This will give our website a cleaner and more modern look, without sacrificing any of our existing content.

So the day we launch our new website, we hope to surprise all of you with a much cleaner and more professional design without actually removing anything essential from our current blog. Looking back at the discussions that took place in the previous months, that is exactly what our goal was, and we are confident it can bring TermCoord to the next level in terms of web presence.

This brings me to the end of the first part in this series. Speaking on behalf of TermCoord, we hoped we managed to whet your appetite, and as for the next part, it will go into more detail about the content, both old and new, and about how we moved some of our existing content around.

So stay tuned for part two!

Article written by Nigel Marneef, trainee at TermCoord