The New Switchplane Website

Our new website is live! It's taken a lot of planning and hard work to get it finished but it's finally here and we're very happy with it. In this blog post I'll explain some of the changes we've made and why, and what you can expect from the site in the future.

New Strategy, New Office, New Website

Although we do a lot of design for print, especially with new businesses, we're primarily a web agency. Over the last year in particular we've found that websites are becoming more of a commodity - anyone can setup a bit of cheap hosting and install WordPress.

We've had to adapt our strategy to focus on the things we can do, but a typical SME cannot: more difficult design work, web and software development, internet marketing, etc.

This change in strategy, along with our move into new premises over at Westham Business Park, meant that overhauling our website was essential.

Planning

We spoke to a lot of our customers and contacts about what the website should have. Some of the ideas are pretty much expected of any business website:

• Make it fast loading
• Update it regularly
• Use interactive features
• Integrate with social media

However, the two things that came up almost universally were to show our work, and to give guide pricing. Another pattern was that some people wanted quick fix content for casual browsing, whereas others wanted in depth content that they could get stuck in to.

Home Page

Since it was clear that the focus of the website should be on our work, we designed the home page and the four hub pages (websites, design, apps and internet marketing) to drive the user to case studies and bite size pieces of our portfolio. The home page has a section which rotates through the four main areas that we concentrate on - we call it a scrollington!

Each scrollington item contains links to a relevant featured item and to the main hub for the respective area. More importantly, each item is primarily a visual example of our work, ensuring that the visitor sees it straight away - hopefully they will quickly find something they like the look of!

Under the scrollington is our social media output. This is the section which will update regularly, keeping Google happy, with replications of our Twitter and Facebook content followed by our latest blog posts. As time goes on we will reduce the number of blog posts shown here, and deep link to case studies and other interesting bits of content.

Hub Pages

The hub pages are designed around the F pattern. At the top is a scrollington which cycles through the featured item. Like the home page, this is mostly visual, cycling through different aspects of the same job so that the user doesn't need to take any action to see what we do.

Lower, on the left, is the key facts section. In our planning we found that nobody asked for detailed specifications - they wanted visuals and basic information. We decided that the most important information (including guide pricing) should be featured here, with a bulleted list to make it easy to read.

On the right, we have placed the bite-size portfolio items, each with a very small amount of information. This should be enough to satisfy the casual visitor, but as time goes on we will also include links to relevant case studies and blog posts.

Social Media and Interactive Stuff

With the continuing ascent of social media, we wanted to find ways of encouraging our followers and fans to spread the word. We also wanted to avoid the recycled "top 10"-type content that is so prevalent, concentrating on offering something genuinely interesting (or at least different).

Thus, Project Awesome was born! Tyler Durden would be so proud.

Project Awesome is designed to:

1. give our followers something interesting to look at and play with,
2. show off some of our development capability,
3. demonstrate that Switchplane is fun!

We've created some awesome items to start things off - we'll be publicising these on our Twitter and Facebook pages in due course, but you can check them out now if you want to get ahead of the game.

Hopefully, Project Awesome will attract visitors to the website and get people talking about us - if you've got any ideas for something awesome, please let us know!