News

Our own agency website - always a tricky project. It means dealing with the most picky client (ourselves), a multitude of opinions, getting the right balance between creativity and SEO, choosing technologies while keeping everyone happy.

Well, after a relatively pain free process, we're pleased to show you our new site.

Creative 

We went with a style that speaks to the nature of our business. It's creative but precise, structured, flexible and technical.

We've used custom fonts to help give the copy a distinctive look. And  we've written copy especially for the site. We're practising what we preach; write great copy for people and search engines will follow. We've distilled long headlines into a short, snappy versions and crafted unique meta titles and descriptions for every page.

Home page

The 'content block' structure on the site uses different blocks which are pulled onto the home page. This complements the architectural style of the top and bottom navigation. We use the classic 'F' shape in a nod to eye tracking studies - placing content and navigation where the eyes generally go. 

picture courtesy www.austinupa.org

The fuzzy background is a hand drawn graphic  - except for one area that is clearly visible - generally something that is being discussed in the agency and relevant to our industry or our clients. This counter balances all the geometric shapes.

We plan to to change the graphic frequently to help keep the site fresh. 

Digital 

There were many choices for the underlying CMS: Wordpress, Strange CMS, Drupal, Concrete 5, Joomla, Typo 3, Kentico to name but a few. But after an extensive study and a desire to push into uncharted waters, we selected a cms called "..."- our security policies prevent us from revealing the real name:)  Here are some of our reasons why.

Open source

There are times when open source is great and there are times when proprietary systems just make much more sense. For this project, the speed, flexibility and cost of open source systems was a driving factor. 

Responsive design 

This was a key requirement for the site - it must work elegantly across smart phones, tablets and regular computers. The design is column based, displaying:

• 3 on a computer
• 2 or 1 on a tablet - depending on portrait or landscape
• 1 on a smart phone

We're noticing a rapid increase in traffic coming from smart phones and tablets so we wanted to make sure it looks great on all devices.

Site builder

A full blown site builder lets our production teams get on with their work, while others can easily create new pages, change navigation, and a host of other features.

Plugins

We love well written, secure and robust plugins and we've used a few on this site.

SEO

The CMS seems very SEO friendly. It's easy to manipulate Meta data and solve canonical domain issues. 

Marketing 

Perhaps the hardest part of this is marketing ourselves. Our work speaks for itself and brands usually find us via recommendation or word of mouth. It's worked well for the last 12 years. 

We hope that you are suitably impressed.