Welcome to the latest iteration of StarkmanAssociates.com. The redesign has been in the cards for a while, but as most people in the business of creating websites for others have probably already experienced, finding the time to manage your own website can be pretty rough. Your own communication needs often get back-burnered by those of clients – and rightfully so. After months of development behind the scenes, we are finally up-and-running with our new layout and new built-in functionality.
We received a lot of great feedback on our earlier version (thanks to the S&A creative team led at the time by Dao Tran, who is now admirably serving with the Peace Corps in Macedonia). So why go through a complete overhaul?
As the new creative director at S&A, you could partially blame me. I came in last year with thoughts on a redesign and update from square-one. It was a classic case of wanting to make a mark and change things right away. Fortunately, I sat back and reconsidered my pace after examining the feedback we were getting. After all, “don’t fix what ain’t broke,” right? So I put ego aside and tabled the site redesign until making changes made strategic sense for S&A rather than just its Creative Director.
So I focused on the clients and their needs. We had been working for some time with clients to develop and manage their online presence from several angles, including those specific to Blogging and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As we have told client after client, when done correctly, blogs can be of considerable value to an organization looking to create a more personal dialogue with targeted audiences. Blogs can drive website traffic, boost search engine rankings, and grant customers, clients, employees and other key groups enhanced access to you in a way that is more familiar, less mediated, and more timely than other forms of corporate communications. While a traditional website typically tells people what you and your company do, a blog can show them how and what you think, especially when used to demonstrate expertise on a subject or present a point of view on an issue that is important to your constituents.
It eventually became clear that S&A needed to “walk the talk” and create a site for ourselves that incorporated the functionality we had long been advocating for clients. We needed a site with the advanced features we were already building for clients, such as a content management system (CMS) that would allow us to easily update a blog. We also wanted to be sure the site was primed for heavier search engine optimization to facilitate the blog’s readiness for all the attention we wanted it to receive.
So we scrapped everything and decided to start from scratch, keeping some key issues in mind. While we wanted the flashy new content management system and a blog, we wanted to make sure that we didn’t lose focus on the experience of our visitors. The compliments we received time and time again about the previous version of the site were that the content was cleanly written and the navigations were straight-forward and easy-to-use. We wanted to preserve that focus on usability.
What we set out to build in the end was a site that:
- Maintains a high on-screen readability
- Has a straight forward flow that keeps a user from feeling lost
- Is better equipped to manage our content and search engine friendly
- All with a massive amount more functionality than the old site
We are pretty excited about the results and are looking forward to where this new site will take us.
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