Made 2.0
After a while that cobbler’s boots analogy starts to wear thin. As we often intimate, we’re an extremely busy web studio, and the first thing to suffer amongst all the work is our own website. (Actually I had a dentist once with the most shocking teeth, but I digress).
Our advice to clients when designing new websites is to avoid creating self-imposed ‘barriers to publishing’. Often, a rigid information architecture that seems perfectly reasonable during the project planning stage can prevent people from adding fresh information six months down the line. In the case of our last website we never let anyone know about our latest work, because that required a 500 word case study that no-one really wanted to read, much less write.
Blogging has redefined the way people publish on the Internet, and in my view it’s not just because of the simple Content Management Systems that power them. Ultimately it’s because the structure of blog-based websites removes all barriers to publishing. People who dismiss blogs as ‘online diaries’ miss the point. They’re really a ‘publishing channel’.
We’ve toyed with the idea of just running our company website as a blog since our very first site-launch four years ago. But we were never quite ready to let go. We were worried that our clients wouldn’t get it, that the vast corporate entities we were trying to entice would be put off by posts about my cat.
Once we looked at it seriously, we realised that embracing the blog medium whole-heartedly would actually result in a more honest, more conversational, more successful company website. Shrugging off that corporate camouflage and talking like real people is the first step in acting on our belief that markets are conversations. (Even vast corporate entities are staffed by real human beings apparently).
And for once, we’re all happy with our website, because it feels like the real us.
