You may have noticed Smart-Thinker has a sleek new look! The old skin served us well but it was time for a change. When SmartSocial (the free DotNetNuke Social Networking Suite) was announced we thought we'd better jack up the website a lot.
On a side note, we had feedback that customers had actually NOT used our product suite in the past based on their experiences and opions of the actual website layout at Smart-Thinker.com. While this is a sad it is a reality that customers do judge your company on the public image.
As a developer with no design skills, this was a hard fact to accept. I had spent many thousands of hours working on SmartSocial only to have a customer go elsewhere because my website was not up to scratch. I think it makes sense to have the best possible public image but the quality of the Smart-Thinker DNN mods disprove the theory that a bad website = bad products. Anyway, lesson learnt and hopeful you can benefit from this obvious oversight. It took about 2 days to select, skin and modify the new Smart-Thinker site - was it time well spent?
The skin is a commerical skin from DrNuke. If you like it and use DrNuke (the skin is called "Catalyst"), please let them know you saw it on Smart-Thinker.
On another note, it was also far too much work maintaining the products on Smart-Thinker AND PokerDIY, and it's far more useful displaying the power of SmartSocial on a live social network, so we removed all product demos from Smart-Thinker. The module demos now link to PokerDIY where we push SmartSocial to the max. All this frees up time which means more development ;)
Last but not least, I am considering redesigning the Smart-Thinker logo. I (the non-designer) Photo-Shopped this up in 1999 when I decided I needed a website as a vessel for my online business ventures. This was way before DotNetNuke and I was coding in VB 6 and ASP back then. I selected the name Smart-Thinker (SmartThinker was taken ;) as it was generic enough to represent a concept - ie. to be a smart thinker and to think smarter. One of the sayings I try to apply to all aspects of my life (work and play) is to work smarter, not harder.
I guess you can tell the logo is almost 9 years old and done by someone who can't draw a stick man. If you have any good logo design resources (or would like to donate a logo (I'll mention your work!) then contact me. The new logo is still going to be an eye with a glint in it (those are turning cogs (to signify thinking) but I am toying with the idea of a world globe). The words "Smart-Thinker" will be on the same line and possible 2 different colours.
Please feedback your opinion to me on the new look and logo ideas - do you like it or do you prefer the old one?