SKAGGS Blog

As some of you may or may not have noticed, we recently went through the exciting process of overhauling our website. Before I get into that, let’s go over our previous design, which will give you a much better idea of the why’s and how’s for this recent re-design.

Skaggs 2.0 was powered by Wordpress and had a heavy focus on the inner office work culture. This worked rather well for a period of time but after a while it became difficult to highlight projects in a way that would provide selling points to a consumer. We had recently completed some very stunning projects and felt like we needed to better showcase our projects in a categorized fashion, as opposed to the (at the time) blog format. See a screen shot of the SKAGGS 2.0 website

How do you define a company who provides a large breadth of creative services?

Now, let me just say that in a perfect world we would sit down for 30 minutes, work out the details and assume a clear direction for the website. However, the reality is we do not live in a perfect world. It soon became apparent that we would need to first take some time and define who we are and exactly what services we provide. Imagine 6 of us in a small conference room, excited to talk about redesigning our website and instead trying to figure out what we do. It’s an odd issue and can make you feel like you are going backwards instead of forward. How do you define a company who provides a large breadth of creative services ranging from logo design, online advertising, web design and trade show booths? This question had to be answered before we could proceed with any organizational decisions for the new website. This answer did not come quickly, but we worked through it.

The next step was to work out the organizational flow of the website. The previous SKAGGS website featured projects in a blog format with a case study feel. We wanted to break away from this and provide an easy way for the visitor to quickly see all of our projects, sorted by a specified type of service as well as selected Case Studies. One stumbling block we discovered was the fact that we have worked with a client and provided many services. Do you then categorize that item as one single project or break it up into several projects? In the end we decided to break these projects into smaller independent projects. These projects would then be bulked together and also become an independent case study. Now we are getting somewhere…

Fast forward a few minutes later and Joe is hard at work doing his thing in Photoshop, creating mockup’s of what would soon be the new SKAGGS website. After a few hours Joe had completed a few mockups that looked very impressive. That was my cue to start taking these photoshop files and translating them into HTML. We had decided to create our website using Expression Engine for the backend. Expresion Engine is an extremely powerful, flexible and user friendly content management system that I have been using for years. It was to be the perfect fit to manage our site while allowing us maximum creative design.

Setting a deadline

At this point we put a deadline in place, a goal if you will, for the launch of the new SKAGGS website. We figured to assemble the pages, enter in content and have a launch ready website in short time. In our excitement to see the site finally coming together we completely failed to realize just how long it would take to re-organize our projects, assemble new case studies and work out the fine details. Add on the fact that everyone here at SKAGGS is passionate about every detail of our work, including our own website, it became clear that this deadline would not be met. And we were right.

Building the HTML and inputting real content led to new challenges we found out. In many situations the content we needed did not groove with the design Joe mocked up.  This led to quick around-the-desk meetings and revisions. Eventually we had 90% of the templates roughed out in Expression Engine. Cue Elspeth, Sam and Nicole who then began to input and publish project images and content. I’m not sure anyone had any idea just how large of a task this ended up being. In choosing to display all of our projects in a much different manner with the new site, this also necessitated most of our project images to be cropped, re-photographed and content to be re-written. Elspeth, Sam and Nicole toiled for many hours a day for many days assembling this content.

I have to admit, I was getting pretty excited to see all of our previous projects appearing in our new design on the development server. All of us were. We really wanted to see this site launch. Bradley and Jonina set a very strict deadline for the completion of the site. While I initially thought this deadline was a bit too quick, I could not disagree with the idea. We had a chance to promote ourselves and really needed/wanted to have the website ready.

Step up your game

I need to point out that there was a LOT of HTML work yet to be done, and we needed a few lesser important pages to be mocked up plus several revisions on already created pages to accommodate new features, etc. Furthermore, we also had quite a few projects that needed to be published to the site. This, with 2 days remaining on our deadline. It was time to get to work. Every person in this office worked like mad on our site for the next two days. It’s amazing the amount of work you can complete when the pressure is on. Not that I believe you should purposefully create pressure to make quick work but rather when the crunch time is on, it’s time to step up your game. And that’s exactly what we did.

If I may interject for just a moment, the beauty of using Expression Engine is it easily allows a team of developers, writers and designers to work on a project simultaneously. We were able to, as a team, publish content in the form of case studies, projects and employee profiles at the same time as editing templates, stylesheets and file management. This, in the end, is the one reason we were able to meet our deadline.

The big moment came at 8pm. Elspeth, Joe and I were here in the office, a bit tired from bustling a long day, a bit hyper for the same reason. Bradley, Jonina and Sam had left to attend an event where they would do some SKAGGS promoting. This was the very reason we needed the website to be completed this night. This night felt very important to all of us. We flipped the magic switch and the site was live. No hiccups, no emergency issues, just the new website we had planned, worked and toiled to create for the past several weeks up and running quite fine. Another satisfied project fulfilled to completion.