Derek T Consulting releases the new Competent Search website

Corporate recruiter Craig Guisinger wanted to take his business to the next level, and contacted Derek T Consulting about refreshing his circa-2004 website. After a thorough review of the old site and discovery sessions with Craig, it was clear that he needed a clean, fast and professional site with a corporate identity that would appeal to his enterprise banking clients.

Designer Julie Rundle went to work on redefining the Competent Search logo and brand, choosing a modern color palette with warm oranges that contrasted beautifully with the classic corporate blue suit. After Craig approved Julie’s concept, she started on the website design. Julie felt that professional headshots were in order and Craig agreed, but had little time in his schedule. Julie mocked up the shots ahead of time to know what would work best in the site, and our team contacted nearby professional photographer Mark Whitehouse to do the shots. We art-directed the photo shoot, which took only one hour (including driving time). With tasteful additions of stock photography, chosen specifically to reflect the nature of Craig’s business, the new look of CompetentSearch.com was complete.

With all of the creative assets in order, the next task was to work all of the content into the site layout. Craig felt that the website should contain a substantial amount of information about not only his company, but also his strong spiritual beliefs and details about his approach to building a successful relationship in the banking industry. Long text can be a challenge to incorporate knowing that readers tend to focus on bullet points, but with her background in language studies and design, Julie was able to effectively and beautifully present the text in short blocks with colored backgrounds that were not tiring to read. Her approach to text also worked beautifully in a single-column layout for mobile devices. The new Competent Search.com website is a gorgeous example of rich content in a responsive layout.

Last, always mindful that consumers love beautiful high-quality imagery but hate to wait for slow websites, Derek chose to hand-code the new CompetentSearch.com, making it devoid of bloated code from any pre-fab template or framework. He made liberal use of HTML5’s new SRCSET attribute, which helps ensure the optimal-sized image is shown to the user based on their device; small mobile devices display a lightweight, lower-resolution image that loads quickly when visitors are on-the-go, while clients in the conference room with large displays will see attractive higher-resolution images. In either situation, CompetentSearch.com’s pages load at blazing speeds (usually under a second).

Upon final review of the completed site, client Craig Guisinger paused and had only to say: “I love it”.

We invite you to visit our portfolio boutique site at CompetentSearch.com and let us know how we can help you improve your website.

Made in California