Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Jeff Bridg­forth :: GasPedal Realign

Realign of GasPedal.com

Full size mockup

Best prac­tice in Web design today encour­ages design­ers to stay away from redesign and think more about realign. Realign­ment focuses on incre­men­tal changes to a site to improve it instead of doing a dras­tic redesign.

As I took a look at http://gaspedal.com, I liked the over­all per­son­al­ity of the site with the illustrated/cartoon char­ac­ter who intro­duces you to the site. I began to inves­ti­gate what the site was try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate and then deter­mine what were the most impor­tant ele­ments of your communication.

Cre­at­ing Emphasis

I noticed that you were high­lighted three things that you do in order to accom­plish your mis­sion; con­fer­ences, com­mu­ni­ties, con­sult­ing. Con­tent that was already on the page sup­ported these three things.

My idea was to make these 3 things stand out more and con­sol­i­date other items on the page under­neath those group­ings. I cre­ated three con­tent boxes to high­light con­fer­ences, com­mu­ni­ties, and consulting.

Sim­pli­fy­ing Navigation

It seemed to me that the nav­i­ga­tion bar at the top of the page was a bit cramped and crowded. It is occured to me that it was com­bin­ing two dif­fer­ent types of infor­ma­tion. The links that were smaller in size seemed to be com­pany infor­ma­tion whereas the other links really focused on the ser­vices that GasPedal offers.

I decided to break up the two groups of nav­i­ga­tion and place the nav­i­ga­tion about your ser­vices under­neath your tagline. It seemed a more appro­pri­ate place to high­light your offerings.

I also decided to rename two ele­ments. First, instead of WOM, I chose to write out the words. This states it plain and sim­ple and the user does not have to think about what WOM means. Sec­ond, for con­sis­tency, I changed “events” to “con­fer­ences and events.”

Blogs and Downloads

To cre­ate a lit­tle more inter­est, I chose to go to a two col­umn lay­out to high­light con­tent from the blogs and the down­loads. It also cre­ates a row of con­tent that you are “giv­ing away.”

Using Twit­ter for the Word of Mouth Tip

Because GasPedal is about help­ing oth­ers use social media, I think it would be a great idea for GasPedal to use Twit­ter to put out Word of Mouth tips. I have inte­grated my Twit­ter con­tent into my per­sonal blog/Web site. There are many dif­fer­ent Word­Press plug-ins that will do this. I sug­gest using the car­toon in the footer area to dis­play the lat­est Word of Mouth tip tweet and have a link to the Twit­ter account so that peo­ple can follow.

In Con­clu­sion

I devel­oped this con­cept very quickly after doing a visual eval­u­a­tion of your cur­rent site. It was also devel­oped with­out the ben­e­fit of your input.

My goals were to sim­plify and apply visual orga­ni­za­tion to help enhance the effec­tive­nees of your communication.

I hope these sug­ges­tions give you a glimpse of the prob­lem solv­ing skills that I could bring to your team.

What do you think?

Con­tact me:

Resumé