The 7th Year Stretch
MRKT Project was founded in 2013 and since then it has been an interesting ride, but this post isn’t about the various ups and down we’ve had as a business… This post is about the fact that it took me an inexplicably long time to finally build a company website.
I should preface this with the fact that I am not a developer, I am a designer and for the first few years MRKT Project was just me. So how did we make it 7 years as a web and app design company without having a website? Well to be clear that wasn’t the plan. Not being a developer I decided the best course of action was to start by building a simple website using Adobe Muse, which had just come out at the time, and then over time replace the site with a custom built site that I either worked a developer to build or learned to build myself. Well that didn’t happen… I did end up building a landing page as a placeholder using Muse, however my plans (even the “simple” one’s I had) always seemed to exceed the capabilities of Muse or my capabilities with the application. Eventually after multiple rounds of frustration and annoyance, I abandoned my plans to build a site with Muse and left landing page in place for much longer than it was ever intended to be used.
Fast forward a few years, and it just so happened that having a robust, or even complete, website had little to no impact on my ability to get business for MRKT Project; however, I never fully gave up on my original ideas for what a MRKT Project website could be. At this time, having met my new partner in crime, Jackson, we decided to start from scratch with a new design and some fun new functionality.
Jackson and I started working on building a new site for MRKT Project with one goal in mind, “let’s do something no one has seen before.” With that in mind, we started decided to use Chrome’s ability to access your computer’s microphone and Google’s voice API to let visitor’s use their voices to connect with us. Was this gimmicky and needlessly complicated? Absolutely, but we felt like we the site could use some sort of a hook to show potential clients the type of innovative projects we at MRKT Project were interested in working on.
We planned for every eventuality except for someone wanting to build, say, a mobile app… Now we did actually build this, but it became very clear to us the deeper we went into this project that we were needlessly complicating the site for the sake of being “innovative” and not much else; eventually we gave up on this iteration of the site all together due to a combination of realizing it was more trouble than it was worth, switching focus on different projects and losing steam. Thankfully we still had that amazing landing page I had build on Muse still up throughout this project.
Almost immediately after we abandoned what I guess is technically version 2 of mrktproject.com, Adobe began the process of abandoning support for Muse and for the web hosting that came with their Creative Cloud subscription, this meant I needed to find a replacement for our well past it’s best before date landing page. Enter the “My Portfolio” phase…
Around the same time Adobe starting phasing out their hosting service they began offering their subscribers access to a new custom portfolio site; seeing that a lot of our project work was already being shared on Behance, it made logical sense to set up a portfolio and point it to our domain. My Portfolio is a decent web application, with some ability to build a customized site, but it isn’t what I’d call robust; knowing that I wanted to eventually do something special for MRKT Project, this solution was always meant to be temporary. It just turned out to be multiple years temporary.
It has taken us a while, but now we land in 2019, also know as the short lived era of Squarespace. The design for the new (or official) MRKT Project website started to take place around the beginning of 2019 after a bit of inspiration came from some new projects we began working on. Soon after we had a site designed, but no time to build it; that is when I decided to give Squarespace a chance, as I had used it for a simple project for a podcast I was working on. Now, Squarespace is probably perfectly adequate for what we needed for MRKT Project, however once again I found its capabilities (and mine) limited what I could do and being unwilling to change my vision, I had to find another alternative. It turned out that the solution I had been looking for was under my nose for a while and that solution was Webflow.
Having experimented with Webflow for another project, I found it to offer all of the freedom and functionality I needed to realize the vision I had crafted for MRKT Project, while also allowing me to craft that vision while Jackson worked on projects more important to our future. And so, with the effort of a weekend in February of 2020, the 7 year journey of creating a functional site for MRKT Project finally came to an end (kind of). There is still some work to be done to migrate our work from My Portfolio over to the site and there are a few details I’d like to clean up, but (and its a big but!) we finally have a site that I couldn’t be more proud of.
Feel free to check it out here…
