Spatialnetworks.com Redesign
Last month, we launched a complete redesign of our company website, Spatialnetworks.com. Over the past decade, our site has undergone a complete overhaul every few years. With each new version, we get an opportunity to update the look & feel, make structural & user experience improvements, and refine our company messaging. This time around, however, we decided to alter our approach.
Don’t Just Set It and Forget It
Every time we redesign the website, we’re happy with the result. The team loves it. Our colleagues love it. Our customers love it. Then, something happens. We forget all about it. We get back to working on all the things we put off while grinding away at it. And there it sits, idly, waiting for us to do it all over again next year. Why?
This year, we did our best to answer that question and institute processes to avoid making the same mistake ever again.
Strength In Numbers
During an early brainstorming session, one of the executives mentioned how he wanted to have every department in the company represented in the creation of this new site. I thought the idea was sound in principle, but I wasn’t sure if it would work in practice.
I’m accustomed to restricting input to as tight a group as possible to avoid getting sidetracked or falling victim to bike-shedding. Not to mention all the baggage associated with designing by committee. I knew he didn’t want that, either, but in my experience, involving more people often led to those unintended drawbacks.
I’m happy to admit I was wrong. We sent the request for feedback to the team and within a week we had a huge number of responses. I was blown away by all the positive contributions. Beyond the waves of quality suggestions, typo-fixes, and content tweaks, however, came something even better: this minor act of group participation completely galvanized the team.
Though not a large organization, Spatial Networks has a very diverse collection of job types. From designers & developers to data analysts & GIS managers and so on, not everyone gets to cross paths with each other professionally on every (or sometimes any) project. Giving everyone a piece of ownership of our company website was a brilliant way to bring everyone together towards a common goal. And not just the common goals we all share in how we do business, but an actual tangible thing that we can all look at and be proud of.
When I help create something, I feel responsible for its wellbeing. It took time, effort, and more than a little careful thought to make this thing, so I want to make sure it ends up landing on its feet. Multiply that effect across an entire team and it starts to become clear that you get more than just proofreading redundancy when you empower more people to contribute on the company website.
Rebuilding
While involving more team members was an important step toward overhauling our design process, we also wanted to overcome a handful of other deficiencies.
The Flow
We first improved the flow of the website itself. The last version was informational enough, but most of the pages left the user at a dead end without any interaction options. This raised the question, what do we want our site visitors to do?
When people hear the name Spatial Networks, they come to our site to learn more about our capabilities and whether or not we can help their business. How can we help them figure that out? Once they do figure it out, what then?
Our new site replaces the dead ends with a choice: visitors can either download informational sheets that concisely illustrate our capabilities, or they can contact us directly to start a conversation. Now, potential customers doing research have a much smoother inroad to engaging with us, rather than having to waste valuable time trying to figure out how to get in touch.
The Code
We also streamlined the way we wrote the HTML and CSS, creating a more modular and scalable approach. Adding new elements, sections, and even entire pages is much more straightforward, allowing for much easier content creation.
The Blog
One area with plenty of room for improvement was the blog. If there’s any section of a website that has no excuse for going stale, it’s this. We migrated everything over to the Medium platform (which you may have noticed) and handed out writing credentials to every employee. Historically, we’ve hosted the blog on our servers which added a layer of complexity to the act of publishing a post. Anyone wanting to write something had to go through the marketing team so they could push it to the site. Frankly, writing is already something people tend to avoid like the plague, so anything that minimizes the barrier to entry is a win.
Careers
Of course, we can’t expect to solve the world’s problems without having the right team, so we’ve positioned our site to be a lot better at attracting talented people. By more clearly highlighting our benefits, perks, and company culture, it’s a lot easier for potential hires to read whether or not we’ll be the right fit for them. This should help garner higher interest for our available positions, as well as provide enough of a glimpse for those who don’t share our same values and working style to keep searching. The byproduct of this will hopefully be more qualified candidates, thus reducing the workload for our human resources department.
SNI Portrait Studio
Ultimately, everything we accomplish is a direct result of hardworking people. Historically, we haven’t done a very good job of representing ourselves on our Team page. It’s often as simple as not setting aside time to shoot compelling photos of our employees. This isn’t really surprising because, let’s face it, who in their right mind is excited to have their picture taken? Nevertheless, I made it a priority to sit everyone down individually during our all-hands week to have a chat and take some pictures.
It was all very low-tech, as I picked out a spot in the hallway with some nice overhead lighting, sat each person on a barstool, and basically made coffee talk while I pressed the shutter dozens of times. In the end, I think the informal nature of this process allowed everyone to gradually feel more comfortable, leading to more natural poses and smiles. Hopefully the improved team page adds another layer of personality, helping potential hires get a feel for us and customers put faces with names.
Keeping It Going
Back in the familiar position of having recently redesigned our website, what can we do to keep the pilot light from going out? We already tackled some of that problem when we gave everyone a voice, empowering them to be a part of the site’s creation. However, that’s only the first step. To completely avoid letting the site become stale, we’re holding an open forum every 2 weeks for everyone on the team to voice their suggestions, critiques, fixes, and wish lists for the site. This will keep the discussion open, the site on the top of everyone’s mind, and everything fresh and up to date.
To view the redesigned site, just go to www.spatialnetworks.com. If you’re interested in using geography to help solve tough business problems, send us a message. Want to come work with us? Take a look at the currently available positions on our careers page.
