“The plumber’s tap always drips”, or so they say. The same is true of web consultancies.
For a good few years I’ve had a nagging embarassment at my own company website, 3form, in that it hasn’t changed significantly since about 2002 when I first built it in about 48 hours over a weekend.
Geekier readers will know that ‘tables’ are out and ‘css’ is in nowadays, but it’s not just the creaking technology that runs the site that has changed, but also the way that people view sites. Screens are bigger, mobile devices are prevalent and sites from only a few years ago suddenly seem in desperate need of a reshuffle to keep up.
Getting past the block
A wholesale redesign is expensive and time-consuming though, especially when you’ve invested in producing content specifically for the way your site is designed. Moving that elsewhere can seem an unsurmountable task.
So after putting it off for years for just that reason, I decided that ‘incremental change’ might be the way to go for a small business like mine.
Limit your own time
Giving myself just the time it takes to travel from London to Newcastle on the train (with free wifi) I gave myself the task of getting off the train at the other end with a nice new homepage for 3form.
With a limit on time you know exactly what you want to achieve and exactly what you want to do.
Here’s what I did
- Brainstorm some words for 15 minutes. Come up with a nice new phrase about your company. Mine is “Award-winning, digitally creative, ideas lab.” This reflects the way that 3form isn’t so much a ‘web design agency’ (which I think is an out-moded concept) and more of a company that helps ideas come to fruition using digital media and creativity.
- Sketch a layout in your favourite design package or on paper for 30 minutes. Once you have your words, use my 10 things to ask yourself about your new homepage layout to give you some ideas on what you’re trying to achieve. Start from first principles and definitely don’t look at your current site.
- Start building. Seriously - don’t hang around. Getting into HTML early means that you’re already working with something you can upload and show to others.
- Build on a framework. There are a bunch of very easy to use ‘frameworks’ around that enable you to build a page that will work on lots of browsers without really having to test that hard. I like Blueprint CSS because you can build simple grid-based layouts very quickly and it comes with some example pages. You’ll find that you can move things around quite quickly without having to do much coding.
- Keep the graphics to a minimum. Use simple colours, boxes and a nice open grid-based layout so that the page flows and feels fresh.
- Fill in the content areas with real text while you build. Don’t put in ‘Lorem ipsum etc‘ because it will mean you’re not getting a real understanding of the page you are building as you go.
- Produce some specific images to go on the pages using your graphics software. I use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, but you could use Skitch or pretty much anything you want just to add relevant content images. Think - stuff that is related to the text on the page and about your company. No swooshes, no stock images, no silly animations. Keep it fast and relevant.
- Test as you build. Does it look right? Does it have everything you need? I not - add something in.
- Put an “excuse us while we’re updating” message somewhere on the page, but not a “Under construction” message. When is a site not under construction? Answer - when it’s been left untended for too long. Oops!
- Make sure to finish it off with a link back to your existing website. If your site runs on ASP, Cold Fusion, JSP, PHP or any of the other platforms, you may just be able to upload your facelift page as ‘index.htm’ leaving your existing site where it is. You could then just link to ‘index.php’ (like I have) and none of your inbound links from Google and the like will be affected.
- Your 3 hours is up! Get off the train. Before you do - send it to a couple of trusted friends. See what they think of it and adjust it to match.
- Leave it a day or two. Are you still happy with it? If not tweak it a little but not too much.
- Upload your work and write a blog post about how you did it perhaps.
The end result of three hours work applied to the 3form website.
What next?
I now feel like I’ve made some progress and I’m able to think about the site without feeling too embarassed any more. It’s made me think that perhaps the way to tackle the rest of the site is in a similar bite-sized way.
Why do we put ourselves in situations where we give ourselves too big a task to handle?
For a small company like mine it’s often better to simplify, break the problem down into smaller parts and make progress on the site whenever I find some spare time.
The same approach could probably apply if you have a freelance designer working with you. Perhaps give them free rein to do something with your site to push it forwards and through doing that it will make them feel empowered and excited by the project as a whole?
What do you think? A rush job or pragmatic design?
