California Horsetrader has been at the forefront of equine classifieds for over 30 years, but its website, Horsetrader.com, needed to have its visual style revamped to enhance usability and highlight the wealth of new Web 2.0 features.
The existing code structure and site width had to remain due to the extensive logic built into the classic ASP search pages, but everything else was to be redesigned. The old version used a very dark color scheme, as you can see in some of the samples, so the idea was to lighten up the visual theme and enhance the navigation so that it never took more than one or two clicks to find what you were looking for.
New features included an editorial blog built with WordPress, live Twitter feed and digital edition of the print publication.
This presented an interesting challenge, as the entire website needed to be enhanced, but I was bound by what a previous programmer had created. The width of the site was stuck at 600 pixels, for example, since it was hard-coded in the ASP and half of the pages were generated by HTML inserted into various MSSQL values. Quite an interesting structure to say the least, but my goal was to clarify the function of the site and make it as easy as possible to navigate. I did this by making each page easier to read and reducing everything back to its basic elements.
