The view from the digital front line

You might think that creating the company website would be a dream job for the designers and developers at Idealogy, well that would be what anyone who’d never run an internal company project across the entire company might think. Too many cooks and other such proverbs never held so much truth but then what’s life without a challenge? And at Idealogy we like challenges.

Creating our website was never going to be easy going. In fact it was like working with a many-headed hydra trying to pin point what we all wanted from the website; you had the fluffy creatives here, the sales team over there, the developers hiding under a table and the finance team having a heart attack. Luckily (read: ‘well planned into the process’) we took on board what we do for our clients and applied these processes to our own site by having initial kickoff meetings and completing our tried and trusted digital fingerprinting process. This led to us producing architectures and wireframes before more scoping meetings. Design layouts eventually followed, before moving into the final build and test stages of the project. Now although that makes it sound easy it has been a hard 14 month process from start to finish for the whole team.

The project certainly evolved over the duration of its life as it swayed from a sales tool to an information tool to an online portfolio and there were numerous discussions about search vs visual look and user experience vs content, ah the fun we had!

As we moved past the initial scoping phases we agreed upon the final format and picked an open source CMS (Joomla) to provide our needs. (Why Joomla? Well it’s a widely used CMS with 1000s of modules available to expand the system and the flexibility and future growth it allows us will more than cover our needs).

During the design phase we had to make various compromises/changes/adjustments (call them what you want) between fulfilling the design team who were pushing the boundaries of what could be achieved visually alongside the technical teams requirements for search, accessibility and mobile-ready development… Not an easy task. We also had to balance between animations for the sake of it or for a practical and worthy use; a balance that is going to continue well past the launch as we add more to the site.

What emerged at the end of the countless discussions and months of design and development work is a site we’re proud of, a site bigger and better than anything we’ve built for ourselves before, a site we think will showcase the best of everything we do whilst catering for our current clients and our prospective ones and a site that will continue to evolve and grow across the coming months.

I’ll end with a little poem sung to the tune of the twelve days of Christmas, because it’s always Christmas for the digital team.

The fourteen stages of the website

Fourteen months of work,
Thirteen architecture versions,
Twelve name changes,
Eleven lords a leaping!
Ten website sections,
Nine copy rewrites,
Eight case study revamps,
Seven Idealogies,
Six tired developers,
Fiiiiiiive coloured strands,
Four hard working designers,
Three initial concepts,
Two CMS choices,
And one grand idea…

Posted by Idealogy