Sonet Rebrand and Redesign

I wanted to kick off my first blog (on the new site) talking about our redesign, and where we are going with Sonet Digital.

It’s been 10 years since the redesign of our website which in the terms of the web is quite a stretch.  Why, you ask, has it taken so long for a company who specialises in web development to get to this point? Well, the answer is easy – when we first rolled out our site a decade ago, it was pretty cutting edge for its time and thus the modern look and feel allowed for longevity, lasting all the way until about 2007.  We did update the content regularly and kept the coding W3C standards compliant, but we never touched the design.  After a long conference call with Sean Ho, I felt the time had come for a rebrand, and a completely new design that spoke more about what we do.  I began drawing up the architecture for the website and came up with a few ideas of how I wanted the site to look and feel, and how we wanted to portray our design and web solutions agency to the outside world.  After relaying this information to Sean we decided upon the design you see today. The downside is that it took us some time to complete as there were just the two of us working at the company at that time, and our clients obviously came first.

After Deana joined the company in 2010 it freed me up to focus on growing Sonet Digital and concentrate on the services we offer and extending them into new areas.  It also gave me a chance to revisit the build of the website. Over the last few months we have been developing the site to prepare it for release – Sean made the decision to code the Sonet Digital website in HTML 5, retaining our mantra of utilising cutting edge technologies and keeping the site open for future integrated applications.

Today we have gone live and I must say I am very happy with the results. There is still much to do, such as keeping on top of the 301 redirects (For those who do not know what a 301 is then check Wikipedia’s definition here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection.  We have a lot of 301’s occurring here – the entire domain configuration has been changed.  The downside of this is that there is a lot of monitoring to do as we want to ensure that the search engines start picking them up ASAP and that there will not be too much downtime. We are also now using ‘prettier URL’s’ which are defined from our .htaccess file, and thus the site is visually and intellectually more appealing.

The excitement of the rebrand and building Sonet Digital is very evident here at the studio at this time.  There is a buzz in the air as we expect to grow in the next couple of years as we continue to offer more services and tender for a new assortment of clients.

Until next time, Welcome to the new Sonet Digital website.