Substrakt Limited entered its fifth year at the start of September 2010. The business has grown and developed significantly over the past couple of years with the introduction of some integral team members as well as the involvement and delivery of some key projects. This has enabled us to further develop and expand our service offering. In order to help showcase these services and projects and allow us to fully communicate some of the work that's going on here at Substrakt HQ, we needed to redesign and develop our own website.

This blog post has input from Jim, our Creative Director and Mark, our Technical Director, who help provide a little more detail on our design and technical approaches when it came to, arguably, the toughest client we could work with… ourselves!

I'd like to start by introducing some important decisions we've made when redefining our online presence. The Substrakt website now clearly splits our service offerings into design and digital. We felt this was an important division so we could fully communicate our experience in both of these fields. With our hearts set, we approached each section as a clean slate. We felt that the larger digital/web-based projects in our portfolio needed a different treatment to the showcase of branding, design and print. We reduced the number of digital projects on display (now termed case studies) and opened these up, providing much more detail on approach, decision-making and process.

The design and print based projects were given a different approach, instead using full-width images & photography, and minimal written copy, allowing the work to breathe and speak for itself.

Our design blog, Distrakt, is another welcome addition to the site. We use the web compulsively in our hunt for inspiration. Websites such as FFFound, Tumblr, and countless design-related blogs serve as an endless inspiration stream. Most, if not all of us use Tumblr to aggregate our findings, but we thought - why not feed such streams into our own site? This way others, both internally and externally, to appreciate our findings. After all, isn't the sharing ethos of the modern web one the things that has made it so great?

The digital blog, Labs, details thoughts and tutorial sessions from our technical team. We have also made a decision, possibly taking a leaf out of Google's book, to implement Labs time. Every Thursday we dedicate half our workday to designing, building and branding great new digital products, from WordPress themes and plugins, to web and iPhone apps. This is also an opportune time to focus on collaborative projects and develop internal efficiency for project delivery

We've taken advantages of modern CSS3 techniques throughout the site, such as; border-radius, box-shadow, RGBA colour declarations and @font-face non-standard web fonts, to name a few. Unfortunately, not everyone has yet made the switch or has the freedom to choose a modern browser. For this reason we've served these techniques as progressive enhancements; they are rewards to those browsers that support them and degrade gracefully to acceptable levels of readability and functionality in older browsers.

We decided, in-line with the way our digital team has grown, to show off some of the technical skills we have here. There is a wide selection of platforms available for web development, and we were keen to demonstrate how we can work with tools like Django, Ruby on Rails and PHP outside of WordPress. Thanks to the wide skill set we have at Substrakt, we can match platform to project, rather than trying to force one system to fit every job. Much in the same way that we didn't want our web presence to be lost in a sea of similar portfolio sites, we think about what's best for the client, not what's the most familiar. Mark will discuss our decision to use Django for the new Substrakt site in a forthcoming Labs post.

You may (or will now) have noticed a secret section below the main site. We had real fun with this. Everyone at Substrakt is passionate about the web; we all use it every day. We've aggregated all of our feeds and content from various sources (Twitter and Last.fm at the moment, Tumblr & Flickr coming soon) into a timeline. You can filter by source or person, scrolling  back through recent activity. We don't plan on stopping here however, this will be our playground to try out new things, constantly changing and growing into an exciting corner of the web.

We hope you enjoy it.