As part of our decision to move forward with evolving the UrbanCred experience and taking it to the next level, we connected with a friend, Michelle from Michelle Perez Designs. One of the main changes done was the look and feel of the website as a whole. And because we're so excited about updating the look and functionality of the website, we did a blog post about it!

Michelle set up an initial call to talk about what I was interested in changing, focus of the change and design inspirations. We talked about the design that we thought was best from a general standpoint to the more specifics. While I had some ideas and thought about in what direction we should go, I needed someone I could trust to implement the vision and apply their own thoughts and design choices. 

What many people don't know was that when I started UrbanCred, I didn't have a Brand Strategy in place or to base off of. I just had an idea and a dream to implement. While I'm sure that preparing all that stuff was important, it wasn't me to prepare all that. I've always been about just taking the idea and making it happen the best I could. But it was now that I realized that I needed a pro to make the next version happen. 

 And lo and behold, in comes Michelle. Founder and designer of MichellePerez Designs. She is a digital designer and creative entrepreneur whose passion is to create clean, understandable, and innovative products. With over 10 years of experience under my belt, I have helped countless companies get to the next level with original designs and ideas.

The 3 reasons why we redesigned our website

1. Visually our website design was outdated.

Our old website design utilized two main colors. Black and white. We incorporated an orange color to the two main colors to help pop and bring more personality to the site. The colors are also more balanced throughout the website compared to before.

In addition, how the website responded to users was very static and dated. We added more visual changes from the zoomage (not a word) to a more organized front page.

2. The functionality wasn’t meeting our customers needs

The old website had parts that didn't work well. Examples being the arrows in the hero image not being visible to the product page not having a restock function. Other things like blog post formatting and auto adaptation for images also help make the user experience a much more pleasant one. Finally, one of the big problems was the navigation. It's been streamlined to be easier for visitors to search and find what they're looking for without having too many menus or places to look.

3. The user interface needed to be updated. 

The new design gave us a chance to update the user interface in some parts of the site. Specifically, the drop down menu allowed us to fit more into there with flexibility on what is shown. The combination of categories allowed for easier searching for customers are looking for while allowing for more categories such as the Holiday Sales section and the more detailed bags section. 

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We worked with Michelle over the time period of a few months to put together a plan where we both suggested ideas and thoughts on what we wanted to see in the final end product. Michelle took it that with her and after some time, she came back out with a prototype of what the final product could look like. I took a look and offered some thoughts, suggestions and places where there were issues. After some work on her end, we upload the visual file onto our backend and load it in.

If some people who came around the site earlier November would probably recognize that while on the Chrome browser, the website worked flawlessly, on other browsers like Firefox, Explorer and Safari, the hero image slide was broken and didn't load. In addition, the quantity, color, and checkout button for products didn't load either. 

That was probably the biggest issue that we had to deal with. After some playing around with the apps installed and the code, Michelle finally narrowed down the issue with an incompatible app that caused the site to glitch. 

After that, the site ran with no issues and we went live! I'd have to thank my friends (codenames for security) Ocelot, Tous, and Phoenix for testing the website and all our customers who contacted us about the issues the website was running into. 

All in all, we're pretty happy with the outcome of the website. There are some tweaks to be done and I'm sure the design will need to be updated again at some point in the future but for the time being, very happy with what was done! I hope this gave some interesting insight on why and how we redesigned the site.

2021 was an interesting year and we are trying out best to stay afloat and alive. We have everyone who visits and shops or even sends us an appreciative message thanks. The lights wouldn't be on if not for our supporters and customers. Thank you so much!