Levelling up
By Gregory Ronczewski, Director of Product Design at Ibbaka.
"Do we exist in time, or does time exist in us," asks Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time, a must-read book I keep close to my bed. I can spend hours tinkering with my design projects, barely noticing the time. Or (and it happens equally often), the time is not moving. It is all a matter of perception.
A decade ago, a well-designed website had many years of service ahead, but now, change is expected. Not only in the realm of new content—this principle did not change, good content rules—but in the form of technology backing up the web presence. From "flat," HTML-based sites, through bells and whistles of Flash and always-out-of-date plugins, we are now deeply entrenched into either custom-coded, dynamic pages or a somewhat simplified approach delivered by services like Wix or Squarespace. Of course, there is always a middle ground offered by WordPress combined with support from, let's pick one example, Semplice as the running UI for no-coding-needed results.
Ibbaka went through several iterations beginning with WordPress and a custom template, switching later to Squarespace 7.0 for simplified management and a good, responsive (looks equally fabulous on mobile) delivery. I volunteered—did I?—to oversee and build the pages. After a few weeks, everything was running quite well. However, I still recall the somewhat mental process of migrating Ibbaka's blog from WordPress into Squarespace. It is possible. I can confirm that. But in the process, images are lost, and links and styling go off the grid - overall, I don't have fond memories from the time of redesign. I went through this process twice - once from moving blogs from WordPress to Squarespace and then moving inside Squarespace from one site to another, which required exporting the blog to WordPress and importing it again. Even writing about it makes me dizzy.
At the beginning of March, we realized that the new 7.1 version of Squarespace, with its fluid engine, which allows design adjustments for mobile independent from desktop and the overall simplification of page structure, I was terrified of the perspective of moving 973 posts from Ibbaka's two, trendy blogs. Nevertheless, I knew we had to do it. In fact, I suggested the change. Time is relevant, and a website that was good for a few years needed a technical makeover to stay and compete for Google's listing, not to mention delivering the expected experience for our B2B users who value their time - simplification or page pruning was not a nice thing to do, but a must. It was time to level up!
Imagine my excitement after reading multiple comments on moving content from Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1 (there is no path inside the platform) when I found a Chrome Extension that makes it possible. It costs $70 and works like a dream - install and enable the plugin. Next, go to the 7.0 site, select the blog, and hit "copy data." Finally, go to 7.1 and hit "create from data,"... then wait. It took several hours to copy 973 posts, but the good news is everything migrated without any problems. Even the styling was preserved - it adjusted to the new 7.1 site style. A thing of beauty!
A few words of caution - check the SEO tab and the optional page titles. I found that Squarespace added the "General 1" title a couple of times, which obviously should be avoided. And, of course, if you have been sharing posts/pages, remember to keep the same URL slugs or set up the 301 redirects in the advanced section. Other than that, the terrifying process was painless.
Apart from the technical bits, which may interest a few in planning the time-space jump to level up geeks, we did change quite a bit in Ibbaka's visual stance. First, we wanted to follow the visual consistency of the Ibbaka Valio Platform tightly - all sale tools and presentation decks and the marketing collaterals are now visually aligned - from typefaces to colours and images that now populate the pages. Although I was fond of the collection of wooden blocks that gave our former pages their distinctive look, I am pleased with the new selection. After all, value pricing design is about people.
Aristotle said, "The whole is not the sum of the parts." I hope this will ring true for the visitor, or even better, for the user of the Ibbaka Valio Platform. But let's not forget Plato, another great teacher - unity and harmony between the body and soul were instrumental for him. Plato also concluded that "forms exist neither in space or time." Another brilliant mind questioning the nature of time. Let's go with the flow of user visits swiftly recorded by Squarespace analytics and enjoy the new chapter of Ibbaka's online presence.
