News and thoughts from the people at EllisLab.

Good job! I like it a lot… specially the action figures illustrations of the staff.

Posted by Efrain from Redlands, California on  Tuesday, May 20, 2008

It would be interesting to hear what you are doing in the Staff Intranet—kind of like a behind the scene look...please??

Posted by Brnadon from Philadelphia, PA on  Tuesday, May 20, 2008

I like it very much. Great job.

Posted by elemental from Slovakia on  Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Oh boy, just seen the comic heros stuff photos. WOW! Rick you draw like that? Great

Posted by elemental from Slovakia on  Tuesday, May 20, 2008

@brandon - We’re still building out the intranet for ourselves so there isn’t much to show yet. Once its done I’ll try to do a post about it for the EE blog.

And because I know someone is going to ask, the Calendar and Group Chat links on the Staff Intranet page are not hints at new 2.0 features. Everything on EllisLab is currently on a stock version of 1.6.3.

@elemental - the comic book illustrations are actually done by a real, honest-to-God comic book artist that Derek Allard knows. I’ll dig up the info for the curious.

Posted by Leslie Camacho from Lincoln, NE on  Tuesday, May 20, 2008

More details about the profile pages can be found on DerekAllard.com.  I wrote about them in New look for EllisLab.com, and the GREATEST about us page of all time.

Posted by Derek Allard on  Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Change is always something neccessary to keep things going, but somehow the old design seemed to be more consistent to me in respect to the different sites. To me, the new design of EllisLab.com looks a bit unfinished with the giant but mostly unstyled headlines and the placement of the navigation on the right, the logo with the home link at the outermost right.

As others have already mentioned over at Derek Allards site, the superhero-style staff pages are very well done, but dont fit very well to the style of Ricks comic figure on the starting page.

But what really seems strange: The CEO of an expanding web company that has a world domination plan has the time to redesign the company website? Must be true superheros over there at EllisLab!

Posted by Markus Stolpmann on  Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Wow, looks really great!!

One question, the intranetpages, why would the menu-items for that are visible to everyone, while it’s only accessable for the crew. Isn’t it an idea to make it only visible for the crew if they have logged in. Now everyone can see it, but can’t do anything with it.

I like the graphics, very cool. Rick, nice job!

Posted by Willem on  Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Sorry, but I have to repeat what I said over at Derek’s and put in my vote that I preferred the design of the previous site. I will not go into why, just making my voice heard.

Additionally I think its bad user experience to place items in your top level navigation which are blocked to the majority of people there. Think of it in the eyes of a visitor, what do they gain by seeing that page? It’s almost like saying “We are so cool that we have an area you can’t see...”.

Posted by louis w on  Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Additionally I think its bad user experience to place items in your top level navigation which are blocked to the majority of people there. Think of it in the eyes of a visitor, what do they gain by seeing that page? It’s almost like saying “We are so cool that we have an area you can’t see...”.

Here’s another interpretation:  It shows prospective new employees that we have some great things in place for them, and it gives our customers a glimpse into those aspects of our company.

Posted by Rick Ellis from Bend, Oregon on  Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Congratulations, the new site is good, though I did not feel there was that much wrong in the previous design.

Best improvement for me: I found out that Ellislab.com has a regularly updated blog (mainly maintained by Mr. Ellis himself) - I didn’t know yet that it had a blog like this.

Now I have to catching up to do in reading (all these blog posts).

Posted by Bram Braakman from The Netherlands on  Friday, May 23, 2008

Vehr naahs! I love that you designed it for 1024x768. Makes a “big” impact when browsing full-screen. Nice minimalist motif. This will be screen-cap’d as a favorite for sure!

Posted by Roger from Austin, TX on  Friday, May 30, 2008

Not to be Debbie Downer, but I really enjoyed the way you had the previous site layed out.  This looks like you grabbed it from CSS cookie cutter layouts.  I also really thought the graphic/interactive treatments were far superior to this format.

Posted by Kevin Fitz from Portland, OR on  Monday, June 02, 2008

Additionally I think its bad user experience to place items in your top level navigation which are blocked to the majority of people there. Think of it in the eyes of a visitor, what do they gain by seeing that page? It’s almost like saying “We are so cool that we have an area you can’t see...”.

Here’s another interpretation:  It shows prospective new employees that we have some great things in place for them, and it gives our customers a glimpse into those aspects of our company.

I’m going to have to agree with the first quote… I landed on that page, and had the same feeling.. as if it WERE supposed to be public, but instead just a bunch of clicking and asking to login.. like a porn site you just want to surf, but you can’t.. hahaha..

Posted by Kevin Fitz from Portland, OR on  Monday, June 02, 2008

@kevin - I haven’t seen templates that look like this site but now I want cookies for lunch. It is rather retro, which is the idea. Not everyone goes for retro but I like the throw-back personally. The idea with EllisLab.com is that we’re making it our playground to try stuff out and that means separating the branding/design from the rest of our sites. Not everyone will like that of course.

As to the Staff Intranet the plan is to present some content there for the public to see how EE can be used in such a way. One of the things that is important to us is to demonstrate how we personally use EE. This has always been a good sales tool for us. So I believe in keeping the existence of the intranet public, but we need to build on how we present that, which we knew when we launched.

Posted by Leslie Camacho from Lincoln, NE on  Tuesday, June 03, 2008