Website Redesign for Reclaim

As you have likely seen by now, reclaimhosting.com got a serious facelift last week! I’m completely thrilled with how it turned out, and super excited to see these designs come to life. There were many goals for the new site, but I’ve summarized them into 5 categories: 1) freshen up the general design; 2) create a stronger VHS tape metaphor; 3) highlight our schools; 4) add more detail about products for potential customers; 5) roll out new services.

I’m going to use this post to share some of my favorite before/after images that will not only highlight that the above has been accomplished, but so I have a reference to look back on later down the road. (I can’t tell you how often I’ve ended up going back and looking at our before and after images of CoWork Fredericksburg.)

Homepage

Before:

After:

We kept the header image and three blocks of text to create a sense of familiarity for our existing users. The top menu bar is also similar, except for a few new added services. But instead of using the majority of the homepage to showcase institutional logos, we’ve replaced that with a slideshow of logos at the top, along with a link to all schools. Other additions to the homepage include a “yourdomain.com” VHS tape (which is similar in design to our new Splash Page & headers of other site pages), brief descriptions of our primary hosting packages for folks that are brand new to the hosting world, and testimonials from a few of our DoOO schools. I feel that it’s a great overview of what Reclaim Hosting is and what we have to offer.

Applications

Before:

After:

Aside from obvious design differences, the biggest change with the Applications page is that it is simply visible now. While the old page was published, it wasn’t linked anywhere so folks didn’t know it existed unless we pointed them to it in a support ticket. The Apps page is now present in our top menu bar, and is shown more as ‘features’ page for Reclaim vs. an answer to a question we often get in support.

Frequently Asked Questions

Before:

After:

I’m super excited that we’ve now made our FAQ page much more involved and up to date. We’ve separated Q&As into sections for Individuals & Institutions, and will be adding to these as needed.

Domain of One’s Own

Before:

After:

My biggest issue with the original Domain of One’s Own page was that potential schools weren’t really able to see what DoOO looked like right off the bat, nor could they get a sense of pricing/what’s involved without starting a conversation with Reclaim Support. Though I definitely didn’t (and still don’t) want to diminish that conversation around DoOO, I thought it was important to bring the same element of ‘self-service’ to this page that can be found on the rest of the Reclaim website. Now with more detail than ever before, potential schools can click through screenshots of current DoOO instances, peek into admin views, get an overview of our pricing model, and even preemptively read through documents like our SLA or User Agreement.

Contact

Before:

After:

The contact form got an update as well. We were using the main Client Area contact form before which definitely wasn’t terrible, but it’s nice to have something on theme with the rest of the site now. And it may be naive, but I’m hoping folks will look through the links in the header before submitting a ticket. :)

And just because…

The 404 Error Page is a definite favorite.

Anyway- there are plenty other changes not mentioned here so I definitely recommend checking out the site for the full experience. Also planning another post on our new services, so that can be expected soon!