Today Motribe launches a complete redesign of its web site and we’re really excited to have it out in the wild. The site, designed by Obox, is the result of several months of discussion and strategy formulation and, like most web sites, cannot be separated from the process we went through to create it.

It will help to look back at the first version of our web site, which had a few minor tweaks over the first five months of our company’s existence. The site was initially focused on selling our monthly publisher plans which ranged from $9 to $49 per month and the site itself was designed over a weekend during our mad rush to get all our services up and running. At that early stage of the company we didn’t know who we were going to be yet and we’re still discovering that every day.

A few things we have learned have helped inform our new design and UX. The kind of people who use our service are so varied and have so many different objectives that trying to split and categorise the audience is almost impossible. With that in mind, our main objective with this new design is to get someone to create an account and play around with the service and figure out how it will best suit their needs.

A major problem we kept running into every time we got feedback on our previous web site was that no-one could visualise a Motribe network after visiting our web site. Now we have screenshots right up front.

When we started this redesign I decided not to try do it again myself. As the founder with the technical and design background and a long history of designing things myself (Mail & Guardian, Amatomu, Thought Leader, The Grid to name a few) I took the radical decision to hand this important piece of work over to a team we trust - Dave and Marc Perel from Obox. This was a tough decision but it turned out to be the right one.

For Nic and I both, separating ourselves from the design work allowed us to debate the underlying structure and massaging about our company with some emotional distance. This, along with the great design skills at Obox, is ultimately what allowed us to produce a better and more focused web site.

It is also the first major piece of code that our new developer Sean could get his teeth stuck into and its been a lot of fun working with a group of people on a smallish project that got done right the first time. We’re looking forward to getting feedback and seeing how it performs by comparison to the old site.