Dust In The Web

Classic story: new website launch, write 3 or 4 blog posts, focus on new client projects, come back to your site and realize it’s already dusty after 3 months. “We’ll do it better next time.” 6 months later your blog hasn’t changed. You have seen this story as often as I did. Truth is, we’re happy it happened to us.

As any new web agency, we need to find our place in this crazy business environment. Being a 3 people team, our web presence is the most powerful tool to gain visibility and ultimately get to the level we want to be. Thus the need to get our voice heard. This became the premise for this year's Heliom website redesign.

Use the right tools

When I was young I learned to build a birdhouse with my grandfather and he told me:

“If you have a messy toolbox, what you'll do with it will be a mess.”

It never turned out to be true for me since I never came close to have any skills with a hammer. However, this principle came to mind for our redesign problem. Our old website structure was messy enough that we completely stopped updating it. We needed a much simpler structure with just the right tools in it so we could make the most out of it.

First off, we completely rethought our project presentation, which was more CSS prowess than meaningful case studies. With the horizontal scrolling blocks, we now have a much more flexible pattern in which we can show as much stuff as we like for any major project, and we have an easy way to display smaller projects in the blocks below.

For the blog, we dropped the (sometimes animated) post covers, which was taking us as much time to create than it took to write the post. We may put them back sometime, but for now it’s a lot of time saved and it helps focus on the message.

We needed to make the process of updating the website as fluid as possible. It is always a work in progress—we will probably update the blog section along the way—but our website system is now improved both for the user and for us. Our toolbox is a lot simpler, and our voice a lot clearer. It will help us get heard and hopefully become more than just a dust in the web.