Last Thursday we quietly rolled out version three of our website.

For posterity here is what our site looked like before:

The new website is the result of four months (intermittent) work. It began in the new year with a plan to improve our copy writing across the site. It then slowly evolved into a larger scale project to upgrade the shop and add a new section too.

General:

We took this opportunity to improve the typography across the site. The type is now larger and as a result much easier on the eyes. We now also use a sixteen column grid for most of our pages which gives us greater flexibility for layouts. We have continued to use watercolour illustrations on the less content heavy areas of the site and left the journal relatively unchanged (for now).

The message:

Without words the web is meaningless. The two previous versions of our site have been focused largely on design but this time we wanted to focus on our message. All of our design and code is produced here at toggle HQ, by hand and we wanted to make this more apparent to visitors. Before starting to redesign the site we had already written the content which we collaborated on via Google Docs. Our new homepage loads one of six random messages that provide you with a snippet of toggle wisdom. We will be adding more wisdom in future – as we get wiser.

The shop:

The first version of the toggle shop was very much an experiment that has turned out to be very successful. The old shop software was perfect for our trickle of orders at the start but over time we have started to require something more feature rich. Our new shop allows us to have much greater control over the e-commerce experience we provide. We can now offer discount vouchers, create invoices and update customers as their order advances through our office. The shop also provides us with summary of sales and statistics making it much easier to keep up an eye on how we’re doing.

If you follow us on twitter we will be sharing our first discount code very soon!

The labs:

Last month we announced Speclative and Postiory – our first two labs projects. We are always working on internal projects here at toggle and we wanted a place to showcase these ideas. The labs was born.

We hope you like the changes (there have been many more than just those mentioned above) and look forward to your feedback.