How We Chose Our Marketing Firm’s Website Building Software
the striking logic & aesthetic gut decision making that drove us to what we chose & why.
By John Marshall & David Smooke
If you’ve got a business — or a heartbeat, for that matter — you’ve got a story to tell. It goes without saying that a good website is one of the most important mediums we use to tell the world about ourselves, but in spite of that, websites are too often thrown together on impulse, and it can be too easy to reach for the nearest, trendiest software without really thinking about what’s best for you and your message.
All startups have that need to explain their idea in a simple page. We were no different, but we didn’t like the idea of immediately jumping to what was most popular or common — we rarely do. That said, we were going to go with the best option for us, but hoped we would find something a little outside the norm — templates we hadn’t seen a hundred times before, and refreshing design features that allowed us to express ourselves on our site in a new way.
Priorities We Considered for Webpage Solution
When it came time to build a website/landing page, our ArtMap priorities were:
- Clarity. As content marketers, our voice is our business, and we needed a website builder that had strong templates, but allowed us to communicate our offerings clearly. Copy matters more than flash.
- Ease of use. We love the internet, we love websites and we love the people that build them up from scratch — but we are not those people (maybe that’s why we love them). We needed something that we could set up quickly, where there wasn’t a big learning curve, but that still delivered the punch of a thoughtful, well-designed webpage.
- Originality. We wanted our homepage to feel like it was custom design when we didn’t have the time or resources to custom make our site.
Plug In & Play Website Solutions We Evaluated… But Didn’t Quite Fit:
Wordpress: Tried and true, great for blogging, plugin after plugin, and the ability to invite many users. Something like 80% of all websites are Wordpress sites, so they’re doing more than a little something right. We use Wordpress everyday for our owned media and our clients, and we both have a lot of Wordpress experience from our days before ArtMap, and that’s precisely why we it eliminated our ability to be original. Marketers know when they visit the most popular Wordpress sites, and we didn’t like the thought process of, “We need a website — let’s check out what new templates Wordpress has.” That kind of thinking is complacent and lazy — it’s just not what we’re about.
Wix: We like Wix (are you detecting a theme here? Website builders are fun!). David bought his a Wix membership as a gift for a friend, and it’s turned into a great photography site. But the design still felt geared to the traditional brick and mortar business, and the traditional four page design (home, about, product, contact), whereas we feel our business is untraditional. We have a marketing service arm, an owned media arm and do things that aren’t maximizing short term profit, like taking portions of compensation in equity because we believe in the people we work with. Again, nothing against Wix, we just l0ok at all parts of a movement as part of one story, and that mindset steered us toward a one page design.
Squarespace: Like Wordpress, Squarespace is great. John hosts his personal blog on Squarespace, and doesn’t have any serious criticism of it, other than to say its impressive ease of use only goes so far. From Day one of our thought process here, we knew we didn’t want something that looked mass-market ‘templatety’, we wanted a lot of control over the site, the shading of the colors, the framing and scale of the visuals (with limited image manipulation skills) and we were going to need a lot of great, readable text. Both Squarespace and Wordpress are perfectly capable of all those things, but you’ll need to have some basic CSS under your belt, or 24 hrs to wait for a response from customer service (that’s not a knock on Squarespace customer service btw, getting back consistently within 24 hrs is f***ing awesome).
In short — there were things to love about all the platforms we looked at. They were all rather easy to use and perfectly competent. But we wanted a little more control, something…dare I say, striking?
Why We Chose Strikingly
Analyzing a decision, good or bad, is always fascinating. You can weigh out the pros and the cons, you can draw on past experience and future prediction, but at the end of the day — websites create feelings and unless you’re a robot — the deciding factor is gut. When we first starting looking at Strikingly, we were taken back by how beautiful things were. These were fluid, gorgeous pages dripping with sex and good UX. I think we both knew this would be what we went with, but we didn’t say it right away, because we’re serious businessmen, that shock of attraction and butterflies would surely fade soon. But it didn’t.
Ease of use, check. Beautiful, check. Different, check.
Strikingly just makes it very easy to make your website look the way you want it to look. Strikingly is young, let’s get that straight, it doesn’t have the decades of customer feedback, the likely incalculable hours developers have spent working on platforms like Wordpress, but Strikingly makes up for this by being a focused tool that does the things it does extremely well. If you’re used to the ‘other guys,’ and take a look at Strikingly’s template library, you might think your browser is malfunctioning, not loading the whole page. They don’t have the enormous template libraries of other platforms, but when you think about it — who cares? All their designs are fucking good —and it’s super easy to add new sections to templates so the design can become partially yours. The fact that Strikingly makes it so easy to make their templates your own means that by the time you’re doing working on it, the page won’t have a ‘theme’ it’ll be yours. It doesn’t matter if Wordpress has 500 templates, they could have 10,000, and none of them would be yours (and if you wanted to make it yours it takes a lot of time, skill and resources).
ArtMap is in the business of telling stories. We believe in the individual voice and the connective power of personal expression. When we found Strikingly, we felt like we’d found a kindred spirit. We liked Strikingly in our guts six months ago, and we still do. We’re writing this review because we want people to know what tools we support, but the simple answer to the question: “Why did we choose Strikingly?” It’s simple to use, and it tells our story with clarity and originality.
