NOW Seems Like a Good Time for a New Site
8
minute read time
Atypic is probably not the only agency who has said “We are our own worst client,” but this has been a true statement for many years now. What we mean is that our own marketing efforts are often neglected for the sake of our client projects.
Client work has always come first.
This past year, when we have had time to focus “on ourselves,” that focus has been channeled towards our office move, the growth of our team through hiring and revamping our development process.
As our agency had the realization that we were evolving beyond what could accurately be referred to as a “boutique” agency, we began the process of revitalizing our online presence to reflect that more closely.
That process began over 4 years ago.
Going from a single-page website uncovered a heap of content needs. As we regularly tell our clients, the best results come when design is applied to content, rather than fitting content into an already established design. We knew before we could get to the “fun part” we had to do something we’ve never done before; agree on a way to describe our services and our culture.
Similarly, our humble nature makes it difficult to talk about ourselves with such bravado. A majority of our partnerships are a result of word-of-mouth referrals. Many of those, and others, have continued to become long-term or repeat engagements. To say that we never needed to market ourselves sounds boastful, but it is true. We have a network of strong advocates and a reputation of being problem solvers that can tackle complex web design and development or challenging branding initiatives.
After a series of team roundtables and meetings with a copywriter, we established our tone and collectively began crafting our new message.
Original Moodboard
This is one of the first moodboards we created. You can see that were were experimenting with color, overlays and gradients from the start.Many years and even more iterations
Over the next few years we chipped away at this undertaking making slow and steady strides. Since the timeline was stretched over the course of years, rather than weeks or months, our favorite work samples and topical blog content became a moving target, which further contributed to our delay.
In the summer of 2018, we formed team committees amongst our agency. This included a team-building committee, a social media committee and, most importantly in this case, a website content committee that was responsible for pinning down these moving targets.
The creation of the new “Website Content Committee,” the energy boost that came as a result of our office move, the growth of our team and the general sentiment of “this has been going on long enough,” are all factors that led to us finally getting our new website built and launched.
Collaboration was important during the process of the redesign. Our Creative Director and multiple designers worked together through multiple iterations that became the final vision for our online presence. The goal was to create an intuitive experience, while also pushing the envelope on functionality and innovation.
We’ve always let our projects speak for themselves and felt that our new site needed to emphasize the level of pride we had for each of our clients and their projects. We did not want our brand to overshadow our work. With this in mind, we found ways to incorporate our brand through the website with color, photography, and video. The green and blue Atypic gradient is a strong brand element carried throughout the site in areas that don’t distract from our client work.
“With this new branded color palette in place, our printed materials are far more forgiving on our cyan ink cartridges.”
Education has always been a core value at Atypic; where we focus on educating our team, our clients and those within our community. We’ve never had an online podium to promote educational content, but we had a whole stockpile of ideas and topics ready to share.
Our reputation has historically been “the go-to team for complex development needs” but we are hopeful that our new website can correct this misconception as we do much more than just development. However we knew the new site needed a handful of “bells and whistles.” We let our development team flex their muscles a bit on this.
Our team of analysts have worked their magic optimizing and ranking a single-page website (as well as they could) for long enough. With the addition of new pages dedicated to our services and our work examples, we knew this site not only needed to look great, load quickly and appease our need for promoting content, and last but not least, the site needed to be found by you and anyone else searching online.
It was truly a collaborative effort to complete. Everyone here, presently and within the last 4 years, had their hand in making this happen. Thanks to everyone who played a part. We are excited and proud of the end product and can’t wait to hear what you think!
