NEW! Swim University 3.0 Tour [VIDEO]

In 2007, we officially launched Swim University with a goal of providing pool and hot tub care, maintenance, and tips that was easily digestible for the average owner. Whether they were newbies or veterans.

Our original design was a static site. Each page was created from scratch and we had hundreds of pages to work with. It was primitive to say the least.

In 2009 we did a major overhaul to the site and made it completely dynamic. We were able to create more information faster and our design allowed for easier navigation and an improved overall user experience.

That was over 2 years ago.

Since then, we have been adding more and more information to our site, but we felt that things were getting a bit stale. So, we decided to rebuild Swim University from the ground up, just in time for 2012.

Over the past couple months we have been working really hard to completely rebuild everything from our front-end site (which is what you see) to our backend administration site.  We gathered a bunch of data about the design and took a really hard look at our SEO or search engine optimization, and felt we needed to improve the site, not just for SEO, but for the user experience as well.

This what Swim University has looked like for the past 2 years. Now, as a designer, we usually tend to hate what we’ve done in years past. Well, at least I do. I can be very critical of my own work. With that said, I still liked the design. I liked the color choices and most of the layout. So, we decided to just improve bits and pieces of it and give it a better and smoother look.

So, here we have the old site and now we have the new site. Ain’t it pretty?

I’d like to point out some of new features and tell you about the choices we made when it came to the design.

The Header

On our old site, we use to have a banner ad at the top of the page. When we looked at our site analytics we noticed that this ad was barely getting clicked and no one really paid attention to it. So we axed it! This gave us more room to accentuate the beautiful new search bar and social buttons. We really lacked social networking integration and this was a way to improve it.

You might also notice that our logo is smaller. We felt as though this took away from our fold. Meaning, there was too much logo and not enough content before you had to start scrolling. This way, as soon as you open the website, you can see a lot more of the content.

The Navigation

Our navigation bar is a lot smoother. We are really excited to showcase the coolness of our dropdown menu (which is now animated and much more search engine friendly). It’s also easier on the eyes compared to our old one.

The Body

We kept the rotating features but also made it a bit smaller to allow more room for content.

We added pictures to our “Most Popular” and “What’s New” sections just because photos are cool and make the site more inviting. People love pictures.

Category Pages
One of the biggest improvements we made was to our category pages. Our old pages were simply a list of links to articles. Now, they are laid out in a much more user-friendly view…with pictures!

So those are some of the big changes we made to the site. Each page of the website has been redesigned and recoded from the ground up. This also improved the speed of the site.

You’ll notice some other improvements like…

• Bigger videos
• More social networking integration
• Better internal linking to related material
• Bigger font for easier reading
• Print friendly articles
• And more

We would love to know what you think. Please comment below and tell us how we did. We want to hear your opinion. And as always, “Happy Swimming from Swim University!” See you soon.