Web Site Redesign, Phase 1

As you may have already noticed, this week we introduced an entirely new look and feel to the website. There were more than a few reasons for this, including lots of feedback from our customers, which led to not just a change in the way the site looks but also in what’s on it.

The first thing we wanted to do is make the website a little more in tune with our mission of preserving America’s memories. So we added a whole section on the website, called Why Scan?, that goes into a lot of detail about exactly how it is that photographs deteriorate over time. There’s a been of lot of work on that subject every since pioneer Henry Wilhelm more or less created the field way back when, and yet it looked to us like a quick overview of a 4-5 web pages would be a handy way to summarize all that research. So tune into our Why Scan section and find out why your old photos are the wrong color.

The second thing we wanted to do is to talk a lot more about two key aspects of our service: the fact that we do our scanning by hand, and our incredible safety precautions.

And the last thing we wanted to do is re-organize the web site so that some of the incredible photographs customers have been sending us get featured a bit more front and center. With their permission, we’ve tried to use amateur customer work to illustrate so much of what we do here, and also frankly because a lot of it is really breathtaking, even if it wasn’t shot by a professional photographer. To help with that, you’ll see that we’ll be including customer photos on our home page from now on, and we’ve also put in a customer Gallery where you can browse some of our first selections. We will continually add to this gallery over time.

What we haven’t done yet is redesign some parts of the site, for example the experience that you go through when reviewing your scans and deciding which to keep. That’ll be Phase 2, so stay tuned for that, too.