Redesign of jin-long.co.uk
Jin Long is the club I have trained wushu (Chinese martial arts) at since 2000. In that time I have redesigned the website 3 times, and just recently for the fourth time. Head over to jin-long.co.uk to have a look at the new site.
History
I first designed the website in about 2002/2003. It was a flash site, I no longer have the .swf or .fla files but I remember it actually being quite impressive. It had animations of wushu moves created through a long ‘drawn’ out process. I would find a video of a move I wanted to animate then:
- Pause video
- Take a screen grab
- Paste into Adobe illustrator
- Trace round it (only the outline, the animation would only be silhouettes)
- Copy and paste into Macromedia Flash (yes, prior to adobe purchasing Macromedia)
- Go back to video
- Proceed it 1 frame
- Repeat
The work was worth it as it created some nice slick animations, but with flash dying off it was time to create a html site.
To find the older designs, instead of digging though my old files, I used the Wayback Machine. Wayback machine archives websites by date, not just screen grabs but fully functioning sites. The image below is the design from May 2006.
The next redesign, shown below is from June 2008 (the flash banner at the top doesnt seem to have been archived), the site has remained this way until this year, 2018.
10 years without a redesign. I feel like, visually the design has stood up quite well for 10 years, but where it has lacked is in responsiveness. Responsive design was introduced by Ethan Marcotte in 2010 but didn’t really get widespread usage until a couple of years later.
This post will be followed by my thoughts and processes on the design.