Five versions of one company
14.5.2015
Company website in the making
You are currently browsing the fifth version of our website and fourth that I’ve been part of making.
During the years the site has evolved in structure, content and technology.
We think that each site has been better than the last. Let’s see when we hit perfection.
In the meantime I would like to share some lessons I’ve learned along the journey.
About the author: Janne Salmi, Marketing Manager at Codemate Ltd.
1st was all engineering
My first main task at Codemate was to replace the first generation website. The engineer founders had designed the site themselves and even they were not happy with it. It listed the technologies Codemates mastered and had a nice spinning globe animation on every page. However, it was a start.
2nd was huge
The site design was crafted by Avalon, as well as the renewed logo and brand guideline. So I didn’t have to start from scratch.
The design did however evolve during the process and all the changes were not paying homage to the original design.
The logo and color theme designed for this site are still in use!
It’s too easy to write content. Especially if more people are involved.
The website is about everybody in the company, so everybody should have a say on how it should be like.
This is how I thought when the 2nd generation of the site was under development.
We went through the site content word-to-word with developers and managers. We made sure the texts were thorough and correct. We had several developers working with the Drupal site.
The project took more than 7 months and the end result had over 20 pages of static content.
Analytics showed that nearly nobody browsed the content deep in the site.
Our flawless copy was wasted.
3rd we fitted to 1 page
Two years later we moved from multipage structure to one-pager and cut the amount of content to 1/5 of the earlier version.
We realized that people were not reading websites, but merely glimpsing and scrolling away.
The shift to 1-pager was painful, as we needed to shrink our content to its essence and think what was the most important thing we wanted to say.
A lot of people were involved and the project took a looong time.We were pretty happy with the end result though. This was the first responsive site we had.
However, the main developer of the site was new to Bootstrap and responsive design, not all the best practices were followed in the code. The mobile layout of the site was broken from several parts and our developers had to fix it.
The internal website is not an ideal training playground.
4th was a complete re-write
The 4th version was a re-write of the previous one-pager site.
One of our Creative Technologists in Oulu did a research on our target customers and potential employees on how they experienced the site and proposed improvements based on that.
Although the feedback was surprisingly positive, the site was completely re-built with custom HTML, without any CMS.
We used Tumblr blog and social media feeds to create life to the site.
The content creation was done only by me and the developer, who also developed the site on herself. This was much quicker and more agile project that the previous ones.
I also felt like a real coder when editing raw HTML, using Git commands on terminal and running Jenkins to publish changes. It was all wonderfully complicated system to maintain a simple website.
We aimed at quick load time and high performance of the site as it didn’t have any excess code due to a CMS or framework. We introduced a video header and hosted the video on our AWS instance, which made the loading times quite long despite the light-weight implementation.
5th is for content marketing
The need to develop this version of the site was due to the rise of content marketing paradigm. In the 4th generation site we had followed our developers’ suggestion not to use a heavy CMS on a light-weight site like ours. The problem was that we needed landing pages for our promoted services and we needed the blog content to our website to get the ranks up and to achieve better conversion. A custom system was valid for a rather static one-pager site, but not for a regularly updated multipage one.
So we moved to WordPress. And we ditched the one-pager that we so much loved for its simplicity and uniqueness.
The project started with a wrong foot, since the developer assigned for the project was overly booked and internal projects always come last.
This site development was then handed to one of our new web designer in Bangkok. Like with the previous developer in Oulu, he could craft the structure of the site quickly, based on the specification. Then we could go through it page-by-page and make the needed adjustments on the fly. We aimed to make the site on the Enfold WordPress theme using as little knife as we could. Nothing broke on the big WordPress 4.4 update. I found the project very efficient and flexible.
Once the site templates were in order, I could continue filling in the content and in a few weeks the site was up and running.
Lessons learned
If you are marketing manager or a business owner, these are the steps you should take when creating a company website, based on my experiences:
—
- Don’t involve everybody in content specification.
- Find a single developer who has eye for UI design. He must have the time for this!
- Select a WordPress theme that has most of the components you need.
- Create a site structure and content specification. Snip the needed components from the WordPress demo site to a Word document and write down the actual content next to it.
- Let the developer develop the site according to the spec and content you’ve provided.
- Fix the site page-by-page on the fly with the developer.
- Add as much final content as you can and create a list of fixes the site needs.
- Provide the list of fixes to the developer and check the final site.
- Share the site for review for all the employees in the company.
- Fix all the found bugs and publish the site. Promise to implement the great ideas to the next version of the site.
Stories and Insights
