Few words strike fear into the hearts of ad agency creative staffers quite like: “We need to re-do our website.” All stereotypes of slackerly, work-averse creative folks aside, the task is indeed an arduous one. After all, boiling down the very essence of your firm into a few pithy lines of copy and a handful of work samples, well, it’s akin to crafting your Match.com profile.
Then the inevitable questions arise: Which work samples do we show? Should we include photos of the employees, or is that dorky? Do we need a blog? (You can guess where we landed on that one.) Do we create it in Joomla? WordPress? Drupal? The problem isn’t the volume or complexity of the questions; it’s gaining consensus on the answers. Repeatedly, you hear “that’s not us” in response to elements of the site. Which, of course, leads the entire team inexorably down the rabbit hole of defining “what is us.” But hey, it’s worth the trip. Know thyself, dude.
For purposes of due diligence, of course, we toured ad agency websites aplenty, where we read volumes about “our synergistic skill sets,” “our brand-centric core competencies,” and “our diverse client roster,” and so forth. When we awoke from the deep slumber this terminology induced, one thing was clear: Our site should be devoted to the work, plain and simple. For the work itself is the true indicator of what an agency does and stands for.
Obviously, developing and programming a website nowadays is a clambake compared to the draconian Netscape days of yore. But interesting, engaging content, well…that’s still elusive as ever. Oh, shoot! That’s the topic of our next blog. Anyway.
Well, you’re looking at the sum total of the decisions we made, and we hope you find something of interest in the final product. Photos of our employees are available upon request.
Todd Alley
Senior Writer/Producer
