Company News + Web

Our New Website: The “Why”

By now, you can probably tell we launched our new website.

We are thrilled to share it with the world, and proud of our team who worked together over the past months to bring our new digital experience to life. At the beginning of this year, we made the decision as a team that it was time to update our website. But why? Our past website worked, so why should we change it?

 

---

 

Our website was outdated.

Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and noticed how much older you look? Or pulled that shirt out of your dresser and realized you have not worn it since high school? Our previous website design was a little over three years old, which is not terribly long. However, we had begun to experience some “looking in the mirror” moments:

• Our portfolio featured old work
• Loading time and performance was lacking
• Written content was dated and wordy
• Overall aesthetic was inconsistent

We often hear similar reasons from clients who partner with us to design and develop their new websites. We assess, update, and redesign our clients’ websites all of the time – shouldn’t we do this for ourselves?

Our services needed clarity.

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard “I didn’t know you guys did branding” or “Wow, I did not know you had a video team” from our clients. I often ask myself “Do our clients really not know we do these things?” If our clients do not know we offer a specific service, we need to do a better job of communicating what we do.

• We restructured our navigation to highlight our services
• We added clarity to our services by listing what we specifically do
• We removed wordy language to allow users more easily focus on content
• We integrated relevant work and resources into our service pages

As we thought through how users could interact with our navigation, we made sure to provide a landing page to house all our offered services, as well as detail pages allowing users to dive deeper if desired.

Our work lacked definition.

Projects featured on our old website shared a similar content pattern: problem, solution, and result. While this worked, it had become stale and lacked definition and detail. Many of our projects have unique features that help tell the project’s story and show our client’s success. We overhauled our work to display projects in a more visual way, as well as share tangible results our clients accomplished through the multiple services we offered.

• We highlight multiple services rendered on individual projects
• Show detailed visuals that display finished work on various screens
• Embedded videos and marketing statistics to better qualify our work

It was time to humanize ourselves.

Aside from company photos of our team, our previous website did little to showcase our company or culture. We tout our relational approach to our work, but our website did not show ourselves or our space beyond blog posts or Zoom calls. We felt it was important to show the people behind our work, and to better highlight our company culture.

• We shot an internal brand video to explain who we are and how we work
• We redesigned our Culture page to better define ourselves as a company
• We feature our people and office space throughout the website

What’s next?

As a design company, undertaking our own website redesign while working on client projects is not a simple task. As we enjoy the launch of our new website, we want to share more insight into our internal design process, and what it looked like for us to redesign our own website. In our next post, we will walk through our process and share the details of what it was like for us to start from scratch.

Is it time to update your website? Let’s talk and see how we can help.