“I’m in favor of progress; it’s change I don’t like.”
Mark Twain may have never seen a computer, but he innately understood the reluctance with which many people approach the idea of refreshing their website.
After all, it’s a brand’s primary asset, a living, breathing representation of an organization and the work it does. It’s the front porch that tells your story, your values and your way of thinking.
Think about your own site? Is it worthy of your work, your talent and what you want potential clients to see? Our ideas are always evolving and it’s critical that our tools for communicating them keep pace. For example:
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- Prior version of bravogroup.us
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- What you see today
You can only get better by measuring how all of your digital assets are performing and, frankly, we had room for improvement. Our glance in the mirror led us to examine our core audiences and streamline, simplify and better focus our user experience. For us, progress means change.
Keep these points in mind when thinking about your own website:
- Give people what they want to know. Digital communication isn’t about hammering visitors with a message you want them to hear. It’s about making available the information they’re seeking. Some of our pages made visitors work too hard; simplifying layouts to follow the natural flow of a person’s eye across a page, making it easier to sign up for our newsletters and providing visitors a better UX with which to contact us has immensely improved our digital front porch.
- Be the mentor, not the hero. If we recommend it, we’re doing it, too. Our most effective practices and breakthroughs came from being our own guinea pig. For instance, when “digital” was a new tool, we created The Stream to prove that compelling content can draw supporters primed for action. Our refreshed website builds on the work we’ve put into SEO without compromising readability or the needs of our audience.
- Never break the data chain. The website is not an island; it’s the center of all our digital communication assets. Our mix of off-the-shelf and proprietary products collect and organize every drop of data in order to understand it in context of how the world is interacting with us. With that full picture we can deploy our digital assets in a way that completes the cycle and never breaks the data chain. That transparency is key: Understanding and measuring how all of your digital assets are performing against the audience is the only way to continually improve your efforts.
