Redesigning Our Agency Website #1
Part 1: In which we establish a core teams and start the project
We at Apegroup are re-designing our website apegroup.com and as we are big advocates of transparency we are documenting the whole process of it here. Every week we will tell you how the discussions are going, how the designs are developing, where our focus lies, and so on.
Being a digital agency and doing a redesign of your own website is hard. Not only does every single person at the office have strong opinions about the site, it is also hard to know what reasons there are to have an agency website. Measuring ROI is kind of hard. And if it’s only for vanity, then why have it in the first place? We will try to answer all of these questions as we progress. If we find the answers that is.
First step: establishing the core team
We have set up a team of four young (well, well) and eager guys that will drive this project from start to finish. All of the members have had strong opinions on what our website should be (and not be) so the choice process was easy.
The initial core team is:
- Jonas Wikström: Tech Lead & co-founder of Apegroup
- Christian Appel: Art Director
- Fredrik Gunnarsson: Copywriter
- Nils Sköld: UX Design Director
Start-up Meeting
Our very first meeting happened this week. First, we decided on that we will run two separate work streams in parallell:
- Prototype: a MVP prototype where we will focus only on content. The plan is to have this up and running for the company and the public as soon as possible. It’s better to be done than being perfect, and it’s easier to have opinions on something you can see, and so on. Here we will tweak our offering, our About page and the structure. Then we build on that. This will be built in Wordpress, due to how fast it is to set up.
- The grand redesign: the bigger design work, which will be most prominent in this article series is the bigger re-design of our whole website. This is the real redesign, this is a site which win awards, something to be proud of. As of last month we have a new service offering. We decided that we will follow our process to the point. It will be a great way of stress testing it on a real project, and to tell people about it in a fun and engaging way. This will also be the only project where we can tell the public everything. As clients tend to be secretive.
Stakeholders
Everyone brought one thing they wanted to add to the project. Jonas will do a stakeholder mapping and create a list of the stakeholders we will have in this project. The plan is to treat this project like any other project with a dedicated group and to have a group of people at the agency to act like clients. The CEO of course, and probably a representative from each skill (design, tech and business).
Semplice Labs
Christian, our designer, wanted to try out Semplice Labs, an editor for Wordpress made for designer to build their portfolios. Since we are doing a text-only prototype, we want to focus on making it readable and nice looking. Semplice could be a easy way of doing that without involving developers this early on. He is also doing an audit of the existing webpage, and the early designs done on the former redesign project (which failed earlier this year).
Tone of Voice
Fredrik, our copywriter, will go through our existing headlines and ingresses. Both on the existing website, and on the previous redesign. He will save the texts that are still is good and add it to the prototype. Also, he will do a competitive analysis on great texts on various websites.
Typeform
Nils wanted to add a hive mind element to the project. To get the whole agency involved. We decided that once a week we will send out a Typeform to the entire agency with 1–3 simple questions and let everyone have a vote. We want everyone to feel involved in this project. The first thing we wanted input on was what to name this blog. So we sent out this e-mail today (try out the form if you like, the more the merrier). This is the mail we sent out earlier today.
Hey Apes!
While redesigning our new website, we want all of your help. So every week we will send out a quick form with 1–3 questions.
Please fill it out here, it takes seriously 20 seconds, and will help us out a lot.
https://apegroup.typeform.com/to/jaSIAb
/The Apeweb Team
Nils also took on the Analytics responsibility, to involve the analytics team early on and to get an initial report on how our website performed last year. We will post those numbers here next week.
