Plato’s Got a New Look! How we Designed, Built, and Launched our New Company Website in Six Weeks
We move Fast.
I can’t claim to have come up with the phrase, “moving at the speed of fleeting,” but it’s an accurate representation of how fast we created a new online presence for Plato — without sacrificing quality. So how did we do this, and more importantly for some of you, what’s new?
“The best organizations are a combination of art and science,” Joe Zadeh, VP of Experiences at Airbnb shared with a packed audience at one of our recent Plato events in San Francisco. This is a belief I share, and one that can be applied to any business project — not just the holistic organization. It’s also the philosophy I employed while leading the redesign project for platohq.com.
Always be Growing.
From my first meeting six or seven months ago with Quang Hoang, CEO of Plato, I pushed for a new website. The original site did the job…sort of. But it was definitely one of those sites that felt like it had been thrown together in a dimly lit room, over a week of late nights, early mornings, Chinese takeout, and lots of RedBull. A valiant effort, but not something the rapidly growing team and community of Plato Mentors could be enthusiastic about anymore. Nor did it provide much value for new visitors who were just learning about Plato for the first time. It had served its purpose, gotten us through our earliest stages, our first clients, our first revenue benchmarks, and as Pat Poels, SVP of Platform at Eventbrite said at our summer engineering leadership conference:
“The things that make you good at your current role are not the same things that will make you successful at your next level — always have a growth mindset.”
The same applies to company websites, my friends.
And there comes a time in any startup’s life where it’s time to grow up. Maybe you hit a certain revenue goal, maybe clients start coming to you (YAY referrals), and you realize one day while sitting at your desk, staring at your full inbox, that holy sh*t, we’re a legit company that’s actually providing value to people. It doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges every day, or new numbers to hit, but it allows you to take a step back out of the trees, and see the forest for what it is — a magnificent view of the future, and the tiny path you’re cutting your way through among all those trees.
Impactful at Scale
A solid badge of that evolution and growth from “garage startup” to company making an impact is a polished website that enables your clients, and potential clients, to be successful by providing them value and understanding. It better represents the high quality of the product you’re offering, and it tells a story. It tells your why.
My advice to any marketer looking to take on a website redesign is this: Have people who can understand and implement your vision.
For me, that’s an amazing designer and full stack web developer. Again, the art and science of a website are crucial. And don’t go running to your product developers — the company website is literally the last thing they want to be working on — nor should they be taking time off the Product — it’s the whole reason you have a job. But sometimes you don’t have all the resources. So what do you do?
Plato is still a small team. So we had some decisions to make. We could go a couple different ways:
- Hire contractors to create an entirely new custom website, and have complete freedom with design, but for the team, it’d be difficult to make any changes without a full stack web developer on hand. -OR-
- Build our website on Webflow, and empower the team to be able to make updates easily through their CMS, but perhaps have to sacrifice some design or functionality.
Rather than force us conform our design vision to fit into a box, I gave our designer free reign, or rather ‘structured autonomy’ as I like to call it. We’d been working with a brand and design firm in France, Pelostudio, for a while on designing our web version of Plato, so I knew we could trust them — even with the truncated timeline. And as a bonus, I knew the brand look and feel would be consistent across product and website. Alexis Porhiel, an incredible designer and CoFounder at Pelostudio spent time asking thoughtful questions about the message we wanted to share and the goals we wanted to achieve with the website, and captured our vision in initial wireframes.
Side Note: As a leader or project manager, give a clear vision and expectations, and then get the heck out of their way. *I guarantee you’ll end up with something spectacular rather than if you’ve tried to put a million parameters on a project. It’s suffocating to a creative.*
For our V1, I determined our crucial needs, cutting any unnecessary landing pages. We took design inspiration from Stripe, Segment, and other SaaS leaders who have also focused on the importance of having a good design — something that is both functional and beautiful. Since Alexis had also been working on our product design as well, he had a clear understanding of our Plato clients’ needs: “I knew what people wanted from Plato, so I was inspired to show through my designs how [Plato] is really connecting the best engineering leaders together.”
The challenge was showcasing our Mentors and making sure all roads across the site ultimately led to them, while keeping navigation easy. Again, the previous design work on our web Product came in handy, and Alexis was able to incorporate some elements, and also said, “It was a way to see the Product at a different angle…and even gave us new ideas on how to improve the Product itself.” Bonus.
Then it was time to build. And we still had a decision to make. After weighing the options, and realizing we wouldn’t have to make concessions on our design, we decided on Webflow. The attractiveness of still being able to have dynamic content, and empowering our non-technical team members to be able to manage and make updates to the website was ultimately what sealed the deal for us. Our Chief Product Officer + CoFounder, JB Coger, found an incredible community of Webflow developers, and began interviewing many of them to see who could bring our designs to life.
Joe Krug, founder of Finsweet, a Webflow developer, had a familiar story: “I’m a self-taught frontend web developer. I was part of a startup company that had very few development resources, and had no developer capacity to build our marketing website. They were all busy with building the core product.” Knowing he could empathize with our marketing and sales teams, and seeing his firm’s previous work (https://www.hellosign.com/), we were convinced we found the right person, and the right platform.
To get into the nitty gritty, Joe shared with us how “Webflow’s visual designer allows you to build complex web layouts and see your work in real time — all while compiling clean html, css, and js code. The speed at which you can test different html structures, stylesheet organization, and javascript effects is amazing. Webflow makes hand-coding a frontend website feel like a huge waste of time.”
Sold.
It’s also a quite flexible system — giving us the freedom to make significant changes before, during, and after the development process had started. When I gave him 12+ pages of detailed updates/changes, he was able to implement almost all of them in less than a day. I was also able to hop right into the staging environment and start making final copy and image changes.
So we were able to move incredibly fast by working with talented people, had clear, ongoing communication, and a platform that was flexible and fast to build on. It also helps when your designer and developer hit it off:
All People First
So what’s new at platohq.com? We’ve created a completely new filtering system for our Plato Mentors, so you can browse their experience level, the size of companies they’re part of, and check out their profiles with short stories they’ve written about management challenges, learnings, and solutions, as well as their availability for Mentoring calls.
For those interested in becoming Plato Mentors, we’ve spoken with many of our Mentors and had them share their reasons for mentoring.
We’ve also spent time as a team, reevaluated the Company Values that mean the most to us, and we can’t wait to share them all with you (P.S. we’re hiring).
And one of our most exciting new sections is our Community Resources. Here you’ll find upcoming webinars and events on engineering and product leaders’ most common challenges, replays of amazing keynotes and panels from our events, links to our open AMA sessions, and helpful handbooks that will help you grow as a leader. We’ll be updating these frequently, so bookmark it now.
Ultimately, we wanted to share a bit more of us with the world. To share our vision of empowering a strong engineering and product leadership community — helping new technical leaders develop soft skills and lead their teams to success. As Quang says, “You’re not here for the cocktails, you’re here because you believe in the same mission that we believe in, and I ask you not to leave the knowledge here, but to spread the knowledge [with the world].”
Ready to be part of our community? Learn more on our new website!
And in celebration of the new site, we’re giving away TWO free year-long subscriptions to Plato (worth $2,988 each)! Enter Here:
—
Never heard of Plato, and you made it all the way to the bottom of the article?! Congrats. Check out the new website. Really. But if you need the TL;DR, here’s a bit more about us:
Plato is on a mission to help engineering + product leaders develop soft skills and build better teams. Plato does this through a powerful mentoring platform, where new leaders connect with seasoned professionals for 1–1 sessions, AMAs, and a comprehensive knowledge base.
Plato Mentors have extensive experience in management, and come from top tech companies like Google, Facebook, Lyft, Slack, Netflix, and Spotify — among others.
Founded in 2017 by two French entrepreneurs, Quang Hoang, and Jean-Baptiste Coger who met while attending the prestigious ISAE-Supaero school of engineering, Plato is one of the fastest growing engineering + product mentoring platforms in the world.
—
Ashley is a global marketing consultant working with early stage startups, helping them share their stories. She’s been embedded with Plato as an interim Head of Marketing for the past six months, and previously spent four years leading global programs and partnerships at Prezi, as well as a stint as the Director of Marketing at Redkix (acquired by Facebook). Before transitioning to the tech world, Ashley was an Assistant Director at the University of Washington, where she advised student leaders, and ran local and national marketing initiatives for 49 nonprofit organizations’ local chapters. When she’s not leading a team of incredible people, you can find her traveling, taking photographs, and practicing her French.
