SiteCrafting Makes a Website — for SiteCrafting
There’s a saying that goes “The mechanic’s car is always broken.”
I know this all too well because I married the mechanic and have watched him take exceptional care of the cars of our friends, family and neighbors while driving our minivan with the check engine light on.
SiteCrafting is a purveyor of website services and our team is forever aware that our digital presence could experience the cyclical fate of the mechanic’s car. And so, in 2021 we embarked on the humble but noble journey to redesign our own website.
We know our team is capable of building sophisticated systems for a range of industries and needs. It was time to turn our expertise and our talent on ourselves.
The timing for our redesign aligned with brand refresh work. It’s been five years plus one global pandemic since we launched our website and updated our brand. The essence of who we are is the same but how we’ve evolved needed a visual and verbal representation to match who we are today — and help guide us into the future.
Evolution of Design
Our Design Director Glen Weiman calls the work an evolution, not a revolution.
“It’s fresh. Our former website and design patterns were creating barriers and limitations visually and layout-wise,” he told me.
Among those limitations was the blue angle that has served as our brand anchor since 2016.
“The blue angle came in handy at times but it started to box us in and we wanted to get outside of that and have more flexibility to play with color, shape and layout,” Glen said. “As a company we never like to limit ourselves. We wanted to have room to grow. We wanted the freedom to provide that on the website and other mediums.”
To give us room to grow we said goodbye to the blue angle and hello to a new color palette. Our design team channeled the friendly, fun, playful and hopeful side of our SiteCrafting to push us beyond blue.
“It was a well-needed time to awaken the creative spirit and open ourselves to something new that has been contained by blue, black and white for so long,” Glen said.
Consistent Code Flexes with Design
Our Front-End Development Manager Reena had been thinking about a redesign since we launched our last website. Where Glen felt limited by a tri-color palette and blue angle, Reena felt boxed in by code.
“We quickly outgrew our website,” Reena said. “We didn’t build it the way we would want to today and we bandaided it for a few years. You can only live with bandaid fixes for so long.”
The redesign effort was an opportunity for Reena to build something better.
“I wanted to rebuild the code in a way that was easier and more extendable. The code on the new website is easier to iterate on.”
The features you don’t see but make a big difference for our new site include flexible templates and consistent code. What you do see are subtle animations, updated photography and our updated imagery.
“I love it. I like the addition of the colors. It gives more flexibility and ways to add accents. Everything feels cleaner,” Reena said.
A fresh and clean feel was among the goals on the brand and content side. We leveraged keyword research to determine how we frame our services as well as how content is organized throughout the website.
Insights Bring Impact Forward
Stakeholder interviews helped us understand how our brand has evolved over the past few years and provided foundational insights for updates to our language. We are best-known as a web development company. To forge deeper meaning for the value our work provides we expanded how we talk about ourselves to weave through why we are passionate about our work.
It’s all about impact.
Sometimes that impact is as simple as creating a content management system that simplifies someone’s work-life or a report that demonstrates the value of a client’s marketing program. On the other end of the spectrum of impact are sophisticated systems that enable people to adopt kittens, ensure the salmon-recovery community in Washington stays connected and give business owners the ability to acquire personal protective equipment through a global pandemic.
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We’re proud of our new website and we hope you like it, too. We have a rule that we never launch websites on Fridays. We considered sticking to our rules when launching our own website but where is the fun in that? Launched on Friday, January 21, 2022. Check it out.
