Webvanta Blog: Creating Effective Websites

Coming soon: an entirely rebuilt admin interface

Over the course of two years building Webvanta, the system has evolved a great deal, and we’ve learned a lot from our talented users.

A few months ago, we decided that the time had come to rebuild the user interface. This has been a huge undertaking, but we’re thrilled with the results, and we think you will be too. Here’s a sneak preview of the overall look:

The aesthetics of our original admin UI could be called pragmatic, at best. In the redesign, we’ve not only put a pretty face on it, we’ve made dozens of changes to reduce the number of clicks and page loads required to perform common actions. We’re confident you’ll find it not only easier on the eyes but also easier to use. We want to make site-building with Webvanta as quick and pleasant as possible.

The credit for the new user interface design goes to Jason Reed and Jeff Boyd. Implementation has been led by our CTO Christopher Haupt, with help from Greg Weber and Floyd Wright.

There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes cleanup that’s gone on as well. Through a couple years of evolution, we ended up with a mix of JavaScript libraries in different parts of the interface, and in this rebuild we stripped out everything except jQuery. With this clean, consistent foundation, we’ll be able to continue innovating in our user interface at an even more rapid pace.

Although the admin UI will look very different when we deploy the new design, and a number of screens are rearranged, the new design retains all the capabilities of the earlier design and no changes are required to any site code — all customers will get the new admin system automatically.

We’ll be showing the new interface for the first time at South by Southwest this weekend. Our existing customers will be able to see a preview of the new admin interface soon thereafter, and it won’t be much longer before it’s available to everyone.

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