Over my five year tour of duty at Struck, I took on the many-headed-hydra-challenge of redoing the website, redoing the position of the website (and supporting platforms), solidified a platform for a social strategy, consolidated and cleaned up our pitch and new business documents, reporting structures, and pretty much whatever else came my way.
Struck is a wonderful place, but it is crazy. The legacy of many different types of companies under one roof has been maintained as part of the brand identity to the point that there are no dedicated client teams. People swap on a project-by-project basis. Further: when I started, the company was in the process of beginning a transition to an agency from a production shop.
Over time, this created so much drag that there was no consolidated way of talking about ourselves, showcasing and positioning what we meant. After a point, I realized that no one was simultaneously stopping anyone from cleaning up the barnacles either. So starting in 2014, that's what I did.
Earlier directions played with layering and typography more to create a more crafted/cobbled look than the final clean direction.
The first step was in acknowledging that the relationship of sites to the web had changed, even since I had started. The old idea of a central clearing house of work, a blog, and all the other requisite trappings didn't make sense.
Our blog wasn't getting traffic. People weren't using the filtering mechanics of the site. They weren't getting the point of the agency. So instead of a 'come to the mountain' attitude, we inverted everything. We started studies of whether external platforms could serve better for certain needs.
We jettisoned services onto third parties (see if this seems familiar), such as behance for work catalogs, editing a medium publication for blog and long-form whitepaper content, and relying on social channels to push and segregate appropriately. It meant realizing our people were our strength - so our brand could be too. Whenever possible, we elevated the people responsible for content to the forefront vs an agnostic voice (such as on our blog). For the last two years, we relied on employee outreach and our friends on facebook, while letting me have pretty much free reign as the voice of struck on twitter.
Our designers and illustrators now craft content. Our people have a voice, and our culture is the participation of our employees in that content - and our pride in celebrating that. The weird things we do and what gets done.
That left the site to serve a purpose for a true primary audience: CMOs and business influencers. We focused on only a few overarching client case studies - those that would give a fuller picture of the agency we wanted to be, not just silos of work. We kept asking questions. Do we even need a nav? What's the point of a page?
After that - I started asking if we couldn't spot larger trends in our approach to new business. Anything axiomatic, such as 'every one is different' became a trigger to ask if that were the case - or if there weren't something that could be examined. So we dug into some light sabremetrics of our pitches and our RFPs to find commonalities, differentiators and strengths - and then set about to reboot how we both design visuals and content in each format.
Yes, we put a Zork easter egg on the site.