Website Redesign

Over the past few months, Andrew has been working on redesigning serenadewind.com to make our lives easier when we're offshore. We also took this as an opportunity to improve your experience - intuitive navigation, introduce more content, and pretty it up.
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Launching Serenade Wind

With respect to technology, my naïveté revealed itself when Andrew and I first talked about launching a website. This was some time in February, and I thought it was perfectly reasonable to get one up and running within a month (i.e., by my last day at Warner Bros).

I based this assumption on a fairly limited knowledge about what it takes to do this. Andrew patiently described all of the requirements to professionally launch a website, including having a new logo, design, content strategy, branding, etc. in addition to all of the back-end considerations.

Despite our divergent beginnings, serenadewind.com launched within a few short weeks with four blog posts including how we started this journey. In the meantime, we scrambled in the background deciding on our strategy:

The beta version of serenadewind.com was built on Ghost. Even before Ghost, all of the content (about a dozen stories in varying stages of completion) resided on google docs.

serenadewind.com 1.0 was built on Word Press and hosted by DreamHost. Version 2.0 is built on Jekyll and hosted by Netlify. Rather than a template-based approach, I now create content using Markdown, process images so they are optimized for multiple platforms, execute command languages and have a cursory understanding of what goes on behind the scenes. The benefit of coming up this learning curve is to have more flexibility and efficiency. More importantly, it has been a learning experience collaborating with Andrew on this project.

For the moment, we think serenadewind.com 2.0 future proofs our needs when we go cruising, allowing us to create the content offline. When we are ready to publish, we don’t need a lot of bandwidth to update the site. Thus this approach is both economical and efficient.

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The styling of 2.0 was inspired by some of the best design trends and award winning websites. We were particularly drawn in by esperanto.design, a website that chronicles the year-long journey taken by Robin Noguier through 16 countries. However, as you can probably tell, serenadewind.com 2.0 looks nothing like our source of inspiration.

Here are the before and after pictures along with our comments on the site improvements. We hope you enjoy the new look and feel of the site. Let us know what you think!

Menu consists of About Us, Blog and FAQ
Menu consists of About Us, Blog and FAQ
Also includes Resources and s/v Rachel J Slocum
Also includes Resources and s/v Rachel J Slocum
Search by category, search and only current month
Search by category, search and only current month
Search by category, any month, and tag clouds
Search by category, any month, and tag clouds
In-line navigation
In-line navigation
Cluttered format
Cluttered format
Elegant, accordiant format
Elegant, accordiant format
Resources at the quick
Resources at the quick
Photos and specs of s/v Rachel J Slocum
Photos and specs of s/v Rachel J Slocum

We are also busy working with a designer to come up with a logo. Stay tuned in a few weeks when we unveil the SerenadeWind.com logo.

If you would like to delve deeper into our adventure as it unfolds, please consider joining the Serenade Wind Crew. Our sister site provides more information on what it means to be part of the crew, unlock the pirate’s booty, and receive other exclusive access and benefits.The first 50 members have a gift waiting.