It’s just a fact of life in the Internet Age. You create a website for the way people use websites today, and try to anticipate how they’ll use them tomorrow. Then, the day after tomorrow, something no one expected comes along and changes everything.
Or something you’ve known all along suddenly changes things in ways no one ever
expected.
Or—styles change, and your site looks old-fashioned. Or new technology allows you
to create a better user experience. Or you find a better way to do what you wanted
the site to do. Or—well, you get the picture. Websites aren’t static anymore. They
live and breathe and change their clothes—and, occasionally, they need a whole,
new wardrobe.
Last time we built a new site for ourselves, we wanted to do something different
from the typical ad agency website. We didn’t like the tired rhetoric. We didn’t like
wacky, tongue-in-cheek employee bios. We wanted a site that showed off our work
and featured what we had to say about business and marketing and the world.
In part, we succeeded. We certainly succeeded in featuring what we had to say. All of
our blog posts get hundreds of page views.
But we didn’t feel as if our old site did a very good job of showing off our work.
Sometimes, it was hard for prospects to tell exactly what is we do. Perhaps we were
being a mite too clever for our own good?
So we did something different. We enlisted our own most excellent web designer
and developer, Stephanie Bane, in helping us create a site that would be lively and
cool and modern and make it easy to find what we had to say while making it really
clear that we were proud of our work. We think she’s succeeded beautifully.
If you’re a long-time visitor, you hope you agree—and understand that, for a while,
our new design may be unsettling. It’s jarring when a familiar publication gets a
facelift; most people are inclined to not like it when their favorite magazine changes
the layout or the type. Our periodicals are like our furniture, our sofas and tables
and chairs: we settle into them and so used to them we barely notice them until
something changes. And when something changes, we’re disoriented. The change
calls attention to itself. Suddenly, we’re forced to notice details we’ve been taking for
granted.
But, over time, your room or your magazine or your website becomes familiar
again. You get so used to the changes that you can’t remember when things were
otherwise.
So we hope you love our new website, and we understand if you have some
trepidation. But stick with us. We’ll still have lots of provocative things to say.
We’ve made the things we know people want to view—our work, our staff bios—
even more prominent. We hope we’ve avoided most of the clichés that plague our
industry.
And stay tuned. New websites may not stay shiny for long. But we promise we’re
going to keep this one fresh.