We're an agile-focused digital product agency. Which means we spend a lot of time advising our clients to build, test, learn and then iterate on their ideas based on what they've learned. In most cases, we advise that perfect is the enemy of good. Getting feedback on your product early and often gives you the opportunity to make the product better, as opposed to spending a significant amount of time fine tuning features and functionality before you even know if users really want those features in the first place.
So when we set about to redesign our own website, we made sure to follow those agile philosophies. (The new design is live as of last week, check it out and tell us what you think: www.mojotech.com)
Before we started the redesign, we narrowed the central focus of what we wanted the website to do: attract new qualified clients and have them fill out our contact form. We filtered all of our thoughts and ideas through that specific goal. We have other tertiary goals of course, like attracting new talent but finding qualified leads was paramount.
During those discussions, we came up with a few assumptions about what potential clients wanted to see from us and how we could guide them through our company story.
To that end, we came up with some copy, some wireframes and some imagery and set our designer Matt Rossi with the task of pulling it all together.
We gave him a very short timeline in which to work and a fixed deadline, so we prioritized must-haves, should-haves and would-be-nice-to-haves. We've put the site up and are currently testing some of those early assumptions and finessing some of our lower priority ideas.
The copy that we came up with is close to finished but not as polished as we’d like. We're still moving words around, and coming up with new and better ways to say what we mean. The site is live and we're pushing changes based on the feedback we're hearing from people who've visited and also the people who work here.
That video you see in the header of the home page? It's made up of some b-roll that we had sitting in a folder, plus some footage Aaron shot on his iPhone. He shot and edited all the pieces together in about an hour. (There's a tracking shot in there shot while Aaron was pushed along on our CEO's 20 year-old skateboard.) Is it perfect? No, but it has the exact feel we wanted. Assuming people respond well to it, we'll probably go back to take some time to make something with a bit more quality.
We have some really smooth animations between page views that we want to implement. They'll make for a better reading experience as people flow through the narrative, but it's going to take a bit more JavaScript magic and we were getting close to our launch deadline, so we're doing without them. For now.
We've worked on a lot more than three projects (more than 100 in fact) and yet we've launched with only three work examples. We have grand plans for more, fuller case studies which we'll implement in the coming months. But before we do that we're carefully monitoring the traffic to those work examples, the time spent on those pages and, most importantly, whether the people who visit them are more or less likely to hit our ultimate goal: filling out our contact form.
We launched a shiny new website last week. It's not perfect, but it's certainly good enough to start validating some of our initial ideas. Which is exactly what we'd tell you to do if you were a client.