Stuck to unstuck – getting our own website design project moving
Working on your own website can be one of the hardest things for a design agency to do. The author recorded a podcast about how difficult this can be. Their old site was showing its age and the business had evolved—they needed something better representing who they are and what they do today.
They attempted kickstarting the process several times over a year or two but kept beginning with case studies. They felt they lacked the ability to tell their own story cohesively. Each attempt stalled because they lacked a communication strategy for writing about themselves.
Following analytics research, they discovered users were looking for more content about the company, who they are, and how they work. The old site had a major deficit here. They realized before figuring out how to talk about their work, they needed to figure out how to talk about themselves. Written content—rather than case studies—needed to become their primary focus.
They collected accumulated notes from team members but struggled bringing them together into a unified message reflecting the company. They lacked objectivity about their own narrative, so they enlisted Anna from InkSpiller, a specialist copywriter.
Anna conducted a workshop establishing their core values, tone of voice, and organizational identity. Using her insights and their past notes, she constructed a new brand communication strategy leading to a first draft copy document.
Rather than writing for a predetermined sitemap, they let the message drive the structure. Anna wrote in a web-friendly way, iterating several times until they achieved content giving "an honest and fresh perspective on Every Interaction, what we do and what working with us might be like."
Once satisfied with the copy, they conducted a card-sorting exercise. Natural content groupings emerged, creating labels that formed their new sitemap shape. This revealed they needed three distinct 'about' sections: Working with us, Our approach, and About us. They created new wireframes testing the updated navigation structure and page content before designing.
Initially planning to replace the entire website, they recognized this was a substantial task fitting around client work could take months or longer. They decided on an interim update instead, allowing their new copy to be used immediately with a fresher look.
Without replacing their CMS or making extensive template changes, they updated the design for their new content. This involved navigation updates, new fonts, one or two new templates, and subtle tweaks to existing ones.
Case studies remained largely unchanged, but they started writing project stories on their blog as a stopgap before full replacement. They linked these from case study pages, addressing their biggest shortcomings. They launched these for LooWatt and Barrocal and intended extending them for other projects.
Making the homepage feel more alive required adding something instantly communicating what working with Every Interaction resembles in an engaging way. A concept emerged from a mentoring session about what UX is and their use of it. They distilled it to its simplest representation: "UX is about getting you from A to B." They extended this into multiple statements, creating an animated panel on their homepage.
Overall, they were pleased with results and particularly glad they took a content-first approach, enlisting specialist copywriter help. They planned treating other site sections as future micro-projects to work on iteratively, thinking of their own site as an ongoing project rather than something that lingers and becomes disliked.