If you haven’t been to the Netflix homepage recently, then you’re one of the few. I was at once one of those few out there that hadn’t yet joined the movement that is Netflix. One of the things that kept me from signing up for the longest time was the lack luster, mediocre at best homepage. This is the first page the user experiences. Yet I couldn’t help but think, “How could this site that looks like it was developed back in the late 80’s, be the thing to bring us the future of movies?”

This was the Netflix homepage as it was when I originally did the new concept. I contacted anyone I could at Netflix and showed them the new conceptual redesigned homepage (below). I’m not saying I had any kind of influence, but it’s an awful coincidence that the homepage has since changed to a slightly nicer looking “design”.

I went ahead and took the dive into the unknown and became a member of Netflix despite my reservations about how technologically sound and quality such a poor design could be. Once I was in I was hooked and quickly moved from 1 to 3 movies out at a time, streamed any and all Doctor Who I could get, and became a big fan of the service Netflix offers.

All that said, I still felt like the design was done as more of a working, developer design (nothing against developer, after all I’m one too), rather than a real quality, usable, and astheticly pleasing design. I thought it could be better, so here’s what I put together for a new homepage design.

With this design I’ve incorporated everything in the current site, minus the bland, ugly, dated design. Right away the user knows what this site offers, movies. The color scheme works off of the Netflix red and provides a much richer, touchable look. The new design keeps everything the user needs to have quick access to on the homepage, and removes the clutter and the harshness of the bright red used in the current background.

In closing, we at BeOriginal think Netflix offers a great service that keeps getting better. The current design really doesn’t show the quality, nor get the turnover that they deserve as a great company providing a very current, high quality, and tech related service. A new, updated, “web 2.0-ish” design could drastically improve the new user growth, as well as the current user moral and organic spread.

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IndieFeed wanted an iPhone version of their site to go with their awesome new Wordpress based site, designed by, plug, BeOriginal. Thankfully, we didn’t have to create the iPhone version from scratch, not that we couldn’t mind you. It’s just that the folks over at Brave New Code already provided the Wordpress community with a handy little plugin by the name of WPTouch. With that in hand, rather than wasting time and effort (and the client’s budget) building an iPhone site from scratch, we were able to have a complete, custom, working iPhone version up in no time flat.

While the WPTouch plugin helped speed up the process, it didn’t take care of everything. It did give us a base template to start from. We then had to take the design from the main site and incorporate it into the new iPhone optimized site. To do that we used a complex series of lasers, microscopes, science, crazy mathematical equations, three sour apple jellybeans, and two boxes of plutonium schmear all to miniaturize the design to best fit the iPhone. We think everything turned out pretty great. Our client, IndieFeed, loves it, and that makes it all worth it.

If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch we highly recommend you try it out.

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Most great inventions come from necessity. I’m not saying our web app SuperLame is anywhere near as important as say, the microwave or I don’t know, energy drinks, but it has it’s place. About a year ago I thought to myself, self, there’s not anywhere on the internet to go to quickly and easily add comic word balloons to photos. Yeah, it’s not a revolutionary idea, but if you search the tubes for an app like I’ve just described you’d be hard pressed to find anything as fast, easy, or quality as Superlame.com.

Who, What, When, Where, Why, How?

OK, so SuperLame was an internal project done by us, BeOriginal. We funded and created the site and continue to support it. What is it? Well, I was about to tell you. SuperLame is simply an online web tool/app for anyone to upload a photo, add comic balloons, then save that photo to use for whatever. That’s it, simple right? When did all this nonsense start? Well, I was hanging a picture above my toilet when I fell and hit my head, the next thing I remember was waking up and building the flux capacitor, wait… no, sorry, different story. So, from idea to working beta, because it’s not web 2.0 if it’s not beta, the app and site took around eight (8) days to develop. Since then we’ve continued to update and improve the site, adding such features as comic style sound effects “Whoopa!”. As for the where… well that’s kind of stupid, I’ll just say, the internet. Why? I kind of already covered that in the first paragraph. Basically, whether there was a need or not, I saw one and wanted to do something about it, if for no other reason than to just do it. Now we get to the meaty stuff, the how. Simple answer, computers.

More On How We Did It

Yeah computers were involved, but computers don’t do squat without fingers to mash keys and a brain to tell those fingers what keys to mash. I forgot what I was saying. Anyway, the main SuperLame application was built in Adobe Flash using Actionscript 3. If you know what that is great, if not, it’s basically the tech on the web that let’s you watch all those stupid lip syncing videos on YouTube. Flash allows the creation of very feature rich and interactive web applications and web sites, and that’s why we used it. With that said, while Flash played a large role in the user experience and front end of the application, PHP, another very popular and useful web language played a pivotal role behind the scenes. PHP stands for… well, I’m not exactly sure, in fact I don’t think the first P stands for anything. Hold on, let me “wiki” it… OK, yep the first P is stupid, but the rest supposedly stands for Hypertext PreProcessor. Guess it should technically be HPP, but that just doesn’t roll of the tongue the same way. <sarcasm>Anyway, I’m sure that helps you understand it better.</sarcasm> Oh, and if you didn’t get that last joke, the one with the <tag> stuff, it’s just stupid web developer “humor”, I’m sorry. And on that note, I think I’ll wrap this up before I go even farther off course.

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We recently finished a complete overhaul of the Washington, D.C. based indiefeed.com. IndieFeed provides a music discovery service to the indie community through a number of daily downloads in various music genres. The idea for the site overhaul was not only to provide a fresh, energetic look to an out of date site, but also to make the music discovery process much easier for the user. One of the many features we added in the redesign was an option to play the song directly from the browser via a small Flash audio player.

Taking it to the iPhone

One of the biggest differences to this site than many others we’ve done is that IndieFeed wanted a version of the site designed specifically for the iPhone. Since the site was built on the ever flexible and extensible WordPress engine we were able to simplify the process of conversion from normal site to iPhone based site. The WordPress community is always contributing new and innovative tools for extending the power of WordPress. We were able to take advantage of one of these innovations using the WPTouch plugin as provided by the amazing and generous developers over at Brave New Code. This not only helped streamline development of the iPhone version of the site, but also speed up the process considerably.

And Finally…

What we ended up with was a site the client IndieFeed can now be proud to display as more of a showpiece than a simple utilitarian, get-the-job-done, kind of site. As with all the projects we take on, we always try to blend form with function. We beleive good design should pave the way to a good user experience.

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