Our Own Worst Client: How We Pulled off the Redesign of Our Web Site

Posted April 8, 2009 By Nick Weynand |

In June of last year we all made the decision that it was time to revamp our own Web site, trademarkmedia.com. Just as the cobbler’s kids have no shoes, our poor old Web site was badly in need of a facelift. We all sat down and started planning out the project and quickly discovered that we were our own worst client: unorganized, indecisive and unresponsive at times (we couldn’t exactly tell our clients to hold off while we worked on our own site). After an uphill battle we finally launched the site on March 13th of this year. And we’re darn proud of it!

Why?

Why did we decide to revamp our own site? The same reason many people do: it was just time. The old site had been up for over three years and, though it served us well, it was time to take it for a long ride in the country. There were several other reasons for us wanting to take on ourselves as clients.

New Web Standards

Web standards have changed in the last three years and our old site no longer stacked up. For example, it was designed to accommodate an 800×600 resolution monitor, which is now used by less than 2% of our visitors. The new site is designed to look great on a larger resolution monitor. We also added a high-contrast stylesheet to comply with accessibility standards and a printer-friendly view so that all the pages look great when printed.

New Features

Our skills have grown greatly over the last three years and we wanted a place to show them off. The new site has many new features including streaming Flash video, a blog, RSS feeds and social media integration, among other things. What better way to show off our new skills than with a new Web site?

Content Management

Our old site was not built on a content management system (CMS). Just like all of our clients, we wanted an easier way for non-technical staff members to update content. The new Web site is built on ExpressionEngine, so now anyone can update it from our technology director to the office pug.

Personality

We decided early on that our old Web site didn’t show off the personality of our team. We’ve always had the feeling that we get hired because of our people first and what we can accomplish second. So, we designed the new site to really show off our personality, from the virtual couch on the home page to integrated Flickr photos on each team member’s bio. Interested to know which TM team member spent 10 days on a shrimp boat called the Blood ‘N’ Guts? You can now find out on our new site.

How?

We treated the redesign of our Web site just like many of our clients do. We started out by creating an RFP of sorts where we listed all of our major goals, the features that we wanted, a timeframe and a budget. Then we got to work architecting the project with a site map, wireframes and some design concepts. After many, many, many rounds of revisions we had a layout we were happy with. While some of us worked on coding and CMS integration, others worked on the hardest part of all:

The Team Video

TradeMark Media team members sitting on an orange couch

We had the idea of shooting ourselves on a “virtual couch” early in the project, but weren’t quite sure how we were going to pull it off. We spoke with our good friends over at AMS Pictures about helping us with the video shoot. After running through our ideas with them, we all got together in shifts at their studio and shot many hours of us sitting, standing and doing strange things all against a green screen.

Back at the office, we began countless hours of experimenting with how we wanted the videos to work. Our original idea was to have each person stand up when a site visitor rolled their mouse cursor over the subject. However, after testing at various bandwidth levels and computer environments, we decided to simplify that idea and just have us sitting on the couch doing something we would normally do (some funny, some not so much).

Overall we’re really happy with how the video turned out. We think it introduces our personalities right on the home page and lets people get to know us before they really even meet us.

The Launch

We set a deadline to launch the site before SXSW Interactive 2009. We barely made it. After many nights staying up very, very late we finally pulled the trigger on Friday, March 13th (I know, a great day to launch a Web site). So far we’ve received a great response.

Now What?

As soon as we launched the site, we began creating an infinite list of possibilities that we’d like to explore. Some of them are very simple and we just need to find the time to do them, others will require a bigger time investment. Some things you will see coming soon are:

Do you have some other ideas? Tell us about them.

We’re happy with the new Web site and we hope you like it, too. If you wouldn’t mind, please take a quick moment to tell us what you think at http://www.trademarkmedia.com/feedback/.

Special Thanks

Photos

Here are some photos we took during our team video shoot.

Flickr Set

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About the Author

Nick Weynand is the founder, president and strategy director for TradeMark Media. Nick provides strategy consulting for clients and manages the business activities of TradeMark Media.

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