About a year ago, we decided it was time for a new look and design for the My Mercer Island website. My MI has evolved and grown since its beginning in 2014, and we have been privileged to share many different stories about our community, as it too has changed and grown over the past five years.
Our hope with the website re-design was to create a more modern and appealing platform to better showcase these stories, and we’re excited to continue publishing new articles focusing on local business, community, schools, real estate, and events.
My Mercer Island is a community and lifestyle publication. Even with our new and improved look, we encourage you to keep your subscriptions to the Mercer Island Reporter, as we do not provide a police blotter or the same scope of news coverage, nor do we cover much in the way of politics or sports. The City’s MI Weekly newsletter is also a helpful local publication. We think the more local media resources for the community – the better!
A New Logo, Website Design, and a URL
We worked with DEI Creative, a boutique Seattle design agency, and they helped us execute our vision for both a new brand and a website design. They also helped us transition the site, which previously lived at www.mymercerisland.net, to a new URL at www.mymercerisland.com (which was not available in 2014).
Within months, we had a new logo (pictured below) – what we feel is a fresh and fun representation of the My MI brand and publication.
The website re-design was quite a bit more involved. As it turns out, starting a blog from scratch is much easier than undertaking a thorough website overhaul. This process of re-working a decently sized library of content might even be somewhat like a conducting a home remodel project.
When it came to finally finishing the website re-design, I realized I couldn’t keep living in my “house” during the project – and that’s why I took an extended summer break from publishing. It was helpful to step back and consider what I really wanted in terms of a clean, attractive design and improved functionality, navigation, and user experience.
We hope the final result is an improved publication and reading experience for you. Here’s a quick overview of the major elements of the design as well as some overall changes to the publication and newsletter:
The Home Page Layout
The primary goal of the new home page is to showcase our best articles in a visually appealing way.
At the top of the page, we have a slider of articles that slowly rotate from one to the next. In this section, we plan to share seasonal and our most popular articles. Every couple of months, we will change and add new articles to the selection of articles that we share.
Beneath this slider section, you’ll find our latest “feature” blog posts. If you’d like to see all of our most recent blog posts, you’ll want to visit our Blog page.
The next section – the real estate section – showcases new listings (represented by The Sirianni Group) along with monthly and quarterly market reports.
At the bottom of the page, we have “Featured Events” – a selection of exciting upcoming events taking place on Mercer Island. If you’d like to see all events, you’ll want to visit our Events Calendar.
We also added better navigation, so our readers can click on categories in the right hand column to check out stories on topics of personal interest.
Calendar of Events
One of the biggest changes we’ve made to the new site is the addition of a Calendar of Events (in list format). Since we now have this feature, we will no longer be publishing our weekly round-up of events blog post.
We hope the new calendar will be more helpful to our readers as they will be able to see what events are in store with more advance notice, though we’ll still be pointing out the more immediate upcoming events in our weekly newsletter.
If you have an event that you’d like us to include on our Calendar of Events, you can submit your event information for consideration on our event submissions page.
Real Estate Listings Pages
We also have a new format for our real estate listings pages. Here’s an example of one of our most recent listings in the Mercer Ridge neighborhood of Mercer Island.
These pages showcase our listings with large, high-definition images; a clean layout with easy readability of the property description and details; video home tour; interactive map; and a contact form.
We’re excited that we can provide our listings with this exclusive local spotlight and enhanced exposure to prospective buyers.
Real Estate Market Reports
We will continue to publish monthly and quarterly real estate market updates. However, we are simplifying our monthly market update. We’ll continue sharing the data but with less analysis; the data set for the Mercer Island real estate market is too small and easily skewed to provide very meaningful monthly commentary. For example, one or two big waterfront sales may have the effect of inflating overall appreciation as we compare data and trends month-over-month and year-over-year.
Look for more analysis of the data and trends in our quarterly market reports, as well as our annual market report, which should be the most informative of all.
Another big change is that we have removed the IDX listing information from our neighborhoods pages and other real estate pages. If you are interested in staying up-to-date on current Mercer Island or Seattle area listings and inventory, you can conduct your own searches on our Sirianni Group website.
If you’d like to receive email notifications of new listings or upcoming open houses, I would be happy to set up a NWMLS search for you (the NWMLS is the most immediate resource for learning about new listings, price changes, etc.). Contact me if you are interested.
Newsletter Format
We’ve updated the design for the newsletter as well. Before it was a mini publication in itself. Now, it is simply a once-a-week email from me to you, where I highlight what’s happening around the island, our latest blog posts, and other interesting news you can use.
I’ll be linking out to other publications more, reminiscent of our “Island Links” blog posts (if you remember those). And if there isn’t much to share on a particular week, you can expect the newsletter to be short and sweet.
Let’s get social …
We are excited to be expanding our social presence! Follow My MI on Instagram and Facebook. You can also follow The Sirianni Group (we are the publishers of My MI) on Instagram and Facebook.
And if you have any comments or feedback for our new design, feel free to drop us a line! Enjoy the new and improved My MI!
