Allow Us To Reintroduce Ourselves

The dust is settling on the new switchyardcreative.com. What we’d like for you to see here is more than a redesign — it is a realignment of our site to the strengths and vision of a time-tested Switchyard Creative.

When we began this thing over a year ago, most of our (beloved) clients were as green as we were. Which was exactly what we wanted: together we linked arms and forged a new trail for small and medium sized businesses who deserve the same type of digital content tools, analytics and process automation as their big-dog competitors. As a results-driven agency, however, that did not provide us with much time to see the fruits of our efforts before the all important (and slightly embarrassing) v1 of our website was set to launch.

So, this is v2 — and being who we are, we focused heavily on the process. Here are three of the major guiding strategies behind the process for the new launch:

1. Don’t Do It Yourself

In a previous post, Thomas described our intentions when we decided to contract for our redesign. I echo his sentiments and also recognize one other incredibly important part of this exercise: we were put squarely into the clients shoes. As an agency we pulled in some valuable experience being on the other side of the table.

2. Show and Tell

When we made the move from “Portfolio” to “Case Studies,” our desire was to highlight more than just the aesthetics and technology and instead describe process and outcomes. These projects and strategies we deliver to our clients are still living and we consider their studies to be living documents as well.

3. Eat Your Own Dog Food

We believe in staying current and we take our recommendations seriously. With this redesign, we wanted to become familiar with the latest version of WordPress — one of our most trusted platforms for small and medium sized businesses. When we tell clients to move to Apps for Domains, host on Heroku or Webfaction, move their document storage into a Github backed repository, send their receipts to Shoeboxed or manage their projects in Basecamp, it’s because we trust the technology enough to use it ourselves. (Although, no solution is ever perfect!)