We Redesigned Our Website: Here’s What We Learned

Lessons Learned 

As we do with all of our client work, our team shared learning moments and reminders from the project. Here’s what some of our team members had to say. 

Brandon, CEO & Founder

There is a ton of value in gathering diverse teams to speak into creative ideation. The challenge with branding yourself is the loss of third-party, unbiased perspectives. When you start a project like this, build the right team (external and internal).

Simplicity is always the hardest, but important part of creating a messaging strategy.

If you have ever moved, you realize how much stuff you collect over time. Websites function the same way. For highly active websites, you should anticipate that you have acquired a large amount of content that will need to be carefully managed, considered, optimized, and transferred. The extent of what we had developed was surprising, even for us.

Derrak, Project Manager

Designing and developing our own website involved a new level of accountability that has helped clarify our process. We have learned what it’s like to be on the other side of “us.” We have a better understanding of how our clients feel about what we ask them to do as a part of our process, what it’s like to sit in our meetings, and what it’s like to deal with delays. It challenged us to ask, “Is this step of our process really helpful? Does it make sense and is it valuable?”

This project has brought to the surface in a clarifying way the tension of working “on” the business verses “in” it. We all naturally gravitate to working “in” the business. This is doing the work for our clients, the work that we were hired to do. Working “on” the business is also important, but rarely urgent. We had to manage this tension a lot during this project.

With so many “cooks in the kitchen” and valuable opinions on the team regarding our own website, it challenged our collaborative process. But we saw the real value of different perspectives and holding loosely to our opinions while holding tightly to the goal and vision for the project. This is collaboration at its best. It’s hard to lean into real honest collaboration. It can be messy, but when we see it through the end result is much better and we are better for it.

Alexis, Inbound Marketing Manager:

Content takes a long time and a lot of eyes to perfect and that’s ok. We wrote, re-wrote, and re-wrote (again) most of the content on our website. It’s often a necessary step to communicating what you need to in the right way. Embrace the process.

Simplicity is KEY. Less is more when it comes to engaging your audience and I was reminded of how hard that can be when you lack a third-party.

Kill the jargon. Every industry has it. Most customers don’t get it. Just kill it.

Jenelle, Senior Designer

Your brand is your hardest client! I wanted to try all these new things for PHOS because it felt like we had “free reign.” In the end our design decisions focused on our target audience and what would make an easy and enjoyable UX for them.

Just because we are a digital agency, doesn’t mean that we needed all the bells and whistles of what would be considered “an amazing web design.” Our design process had to make sense for the end user. We had to design our website that showcased our culture, but also gave an overview of how we use strategy and creativity no matter the engagement.

It was a challenge to not make our website all about us. Because well, it’s our website. We needed to make the clients we’ve worked with the hero, showing their successes and how we were a guide to help them get there.

Becca, Creative Media Associate:

Lean into the difficulty. Our stories are always the hardest to tell from a fresh perspective because we’ve become so comfortable telling them. Allow yourself to question your brand’s visual (and verbal) narratives, particularly the ones you’ve been telling for years, because even if you end up in the same place you started you’ll know you’re sharing the most powerful and authentic version of your visual identity.

A rebrand/refresh isn’t just for your audience, it’s for you and your team too. The process and the result of reevaluating your visual narrative is fun and empowering. It gives your team something fresh to 1) feel ownership over and 2) be proud to represent.
Different is not always better. Visual narratives cannot just be good, they have to be right. Sometimes the story you’ve been telling for years is the right one, and that’s okay! In fact, it’s exciting! Be willing to discover that.