If you visited our cloud hosting page when it officially launched on June 28, you got a sneak peek of our new website design. Several of our followers on Twitter quickly commented about how much they liked the new look, so we’ve been excitedly working to transition the full site.

We could have taken the “easy” route of re-skinning our previous layout with new images and styles, but we wanted to incorporate the usability feedback we’ve gathered to make our site the easiest to use and most value-rich in the industry. We identified choke points in the previous design, A-B tested various new styles, redefined our site structure, created new content and completely redesigned our shopping cart.

Needless to say, our team has been working pretty long hours over the past few months to get everything done so quickly.

The payoff came on Saturday evening when we officially flipped the switch and brought the new site to life:

One of the biggest challenges in redesigning such a large site is finding an aesthetically pleasing way to show the full breadth and depth of The Planet’s products and services without over-complicating the user experience. If a user hears about Server Cloud from one of their friends, they should be able to visit our homepage and get to the content they need quickly. In that example, the user would click “Cloud Hosting” in the primary navigation to find links and content pertaining to Server Cloud:

Being one of the few hosts in the industry to offer everything from colocation up through fully managed hosting, we were also faced with the challenge of helping customers get a high-level understanding of our product and service spectrum to help them decide what kind of hosting solutions best meet their needs. We had a good foundation with our “Power to Choose” graphic, but it was missing something. As a buyer, I always want to know what I’m responsible for and what I can expect from my service provider. So we worked that concept into a graphic that also illustrates the breadth of our service offerings:

One of our biggest goals was to be as transparent and informative as possible without needlessly adding content for content’s sake. Our website is a resource for prospective customers and current customers alike. We made our navigation more intuitive. We also provided more technical content and consolidated that content on about 40% fewer pages. To simplify contacting us — whether you have a technical, billing or sales question — we’ve incorporated live chat and phone options throughout the site.

When a new customer comes to our site and decides to place an order, they’ll get to use our redesigned shopping cart to customize their solution:

To revitalize the checkout experience, we made changes to more clearly display available options; provided additional information via help buttons; and tied together the entire process with clear review and checkout pages to help users ensure they are ordering exactly what they want.

If you have a few minutes, click around the new site and come back here to leave a comment with your thoughts. What are your favorite changes? What do you wish we would have maintained from the previous site? How can we make the new site even better?

-Kyle