2013 is our 13th year in business and this site will be our 5th website re-design!
To be fair this one was very overdue! (like the tale of the cobbler and his own shoes, we are always so busy for clients, our own marketing activity takes a back seat!)
When I think back to our very first website back in 2000, it makes me chuckle as it was so basic! It was just one page!
We’ve done various types of sites since then and what we have learnt and where we are at now with our newest, is interestingly that despite the amazing amount of bells and whistles, functionality and complexity it is possible to have on your website these days – actually simple is still best! What are the main things that people want to get from your website? I think it is:
– Who you are?
– What is your credibility?
– What have you done?
– How can you help them?
– How can I contact you?
Yes, there are always more content ideas you can include, but generally the points above are the ones that most of the people you want to view your site are interested in.
We worked closely with and were advised brilliantly by Clear Creative who are a full service creative design agency. What they helped us to do was to think about our marketing strategy first – who we wanted to be looking at the site and what did we want them to do once they were there? The team at Clear are very successful at creating websites for clients that actually generate results and increase profits. They do this by looking at the marketing strategy first and then creating a site to fit this, rather than the other way round.
So the first step we did was to sit down with them, go through our business model including who we help with our video production service and who we want to work with more in the future. This allowed them to create a wireframe and site structure. This allowed us to identify how many pages we wanted and what sub pages we wanted. We were advised by Clear to keep our navigation and main menu bar as simple as possible with a maximum of 5 items and have sub headings within these buttons. This allows the visitor to clearly see where they want to go.
Once the wireframe and site structure was established the team at Clear Creative came up with a design and template for us to approve initially before the rest of the site was created. Then came the content writing! There is no getting around it, this was time consuming. We tried to strike a balance between providing all the key information that visitors will be interested to read about without them losing the will to live with how long it was! So we worked to keep it concise but useful.
Obviously a critical factor for our site was being able to demonstrate videos we have done – with us having produced literally 100’s over the years, we had to choose our best examples. Although this was made easier by us only choosing our work from recent times that is in HD, as the older formats are not as high quality for web playback. We also felt it important to show how busy and current our company is and the amount of successful projects we have done recently.
Another critical factor was the inclusion of social media links and of course a blog, which is being showcased now!
Ultimately I would say that we have been lucky to work with a fantastic creative agency who were able to advise us from a full marketing point of view and help the website to fit within our marketing plan rather than just be a technical operation of building a site that looked pretty, although we think it does that too!
We hope you enjoy our new site and it is useful. Please free to leave any comments below…..
