Announcing a brand-new website and another powerful example of the business blog. SecurShred is a document and electronic media destruction company based in Burlington Vermont.

Starting Point

Before - Frames and Inconsistent

We started with a nice concept. Using torn paper for highlights quickly made the user aware of the company background. However, every page was hand-coded and inconsistent. It also used a frames-approach, making is in-accessible and difficult for web search crawlers to index.

SecurShred also wanted to keep their website updated without calling or relying on 3rd party resources, like web designers. This content included press releases, testimonial and industry news.

Re-Design

After — Web Standards, Consistent and Clean

Redesigning this site was fun. As a young company, the entire management staff at SecurShred was fully engaged. Our website building process worked efficiently.

We started from the existing design and iterated on some rough ideas for the new design. Working with SecurShred staff, we created a site outline identifying the sections of the website. This was used to create the navigation and page layout templates. Next we integrated the content and created content-specific elements, like the recent news callout box in the news section. We finished the project with web-conference training on the CMS and delivered a great finished product.

Technical Details

The site also uses modular XHTML, adding the “target” attribute in a new DTD which was necessary for the plant cam link. This is an example of using and extending existing standards properly.

The backend CMS is again Textpattern. This easy to use system allows SecurShred staff to “push-button” publish new articles. This new content (a.k.a. business blogging) complements the energetic brand and has already lead to higher search rankings.