A Look Into Our Website Redesign Process
Today we’re excited to launch our brand new website for Upstate Interactive! This has been a work in progress for the better part of a year, fine-tuning all of the details to really fit in with the message we want to send with our branding. Since so much care was put into the creation of our new look, we wanted to share a little bit about the process we went through to get the final result.
We followed the same process for redesigning our website that we do when creating products for our own clients. It’s the Discovery process, which we’ve detailed in a previous blog post. This phase helps us mitigate time and expense risks by performing research prior to beginning development, rather than discovering as we go and potentially wasting time and money creating a product that no longer serves our goal if we learn something that causes us to pivot.
Rather than do the Discovery phase ourselves, we thought it best to hire a third party to look inward. A fresh pair of unbiased eyes can be really helpful. We hired the creative and talented Josiah Ludovico of Brand Experience to help us with the design aspects of our website, such as the development of our brand guide and tweaking our logo.
The Discovery phase we follow involves interviews (in our case, with UI partners as well as previous clients), customer and market research, and essentially highlighting a goal that the end result will achieve.
Our goal: to position our company as a leader in building custom web and mobile applications, as well as blockchain distributed applications for the modern enterprise. We’re often a great fit for enterprises, as we can come in and help them scale up quickly. Being a smaller team, we are a lot more agile and flexible than larger companies, which allows them to focus on big-picture strategies while our team works on execution.
In the beginning, Josiah asked us to share our points of differentiation — that is, what makes UI special! We wanted to highlight our technical expertise with Angular, JavaScript, Ethereum, Solidity, smart contracts, DApps, and more. With our focus on blockchain and software development, he went to work designing versions of our home page for us to choose from.
“These ‘blocks’ are the universal visual metaphor for blockchain as far as I could tell in my research, and since blockchain seems to be the future of development services, it seemed to make sense to focus on that particular service above the fold. Other ‘linear’ illustrations will be treated in a similar way that represent the core services indicated on the new site map. My main goal with the design is to distinguish the UI image/brand as a clever group of talent.” — Josiah
We ultimately decided on the top version for the deeper colors that let the blocks stand out more.
Josiah also went through our previous website copy and found a statement that stood out to him, which was something we could all agree on was solid enough to be one of our new taglines.
The right software can change everything.
That’s something we very much believe to be true, and so it appears on our website in the custom software-development section.
Josiah also helped us choose our new logo as well, which pulls from the gradient design on our website. You’d think it would be easy to pick a favorite, but take a look at all the options to choose from:
Ultimately, we didn’t choose any of them exactly. We decided to go with #10 and add a little extra turquoise into the gradient to make it look like there was a little more of a light source.
Big shout out to Josiah for sticking with us through this entire process and helping us bring our ideas to life. We hope you all enjoy the new website! Check it out here, and let us know what you think on Twitter.
