Marketing Dilemma

B12Event.com

At Vintage 56, a lot of the work we do is on larger websites that need a redesign or mini-sites for a single event or product. When asked, though, it’s really fun to be able to work on a little gem of a website that will grow with it’s new owners as they go from a small organization to international status. That’s exactly the site we got to build for Gail McWilliams. Although, the organization had been around for years, their new venture, B12 Events, is very new. Building this small site, we recorded some of our important lessons:

• Give yourself room to grow. Only have four pages of content? That’s a blessing. Half the time we’re trying to convince clients not to put twenty links in the main navigation bar. Just remember to design it with the ability to nicely add more main pages (or sections) without breaking the design when the site grows. If you don’t give them an option to grow within your design, somebody is going to throw twenty new pages in that main navigation one day and blame the original designers (you) when it breaks. The worst part is, when they blame you, they’re right. I know they were right to blame me at times.
• Don’t let the design overpower the content. The homepage needed to highlight four things: a text introduction about Gail and B12, a video teaser that our team had put together, some memorable quotes from influential people, and a call to action. Anything else was a distraction. More importantly, any design that couldn’t take a backseat to that kind of content was a failure on our part. A front page for a 100+ page site with news, events, an online store, and giant scrolling banner content may look fantastic with your animated navigation and multi-textured background of many colors, but doing that on a small site is just irresponsible. The entire point of our designs are to highlight their content, after all.
• We are getting paid for the details. In a simple design like this, every decision seems to matter that much more. We debated the size and color of our quotation marks on the blockquotes, and we tried wrapping marks on both sides or just the left. We tweaked the speed of the animation on the front page back and forth by milliseconds. We fretted about the color for the call-to-action button. The first iteration had 5 pixels less white space between two rows on the homepage. It looked fine, but it didn’t look perfect. We didn’t spend more time on each element simply because there were less of them and we charge by the hour (we don’t); and we didn’t keep tweaking so that designers would know we used a baseline grid (flexibly, since we won’t be the only ones adding content). We fretted because, when there are only five elements on a page, the spacing between those rows was distracting. Maybe only a designer would know what was wrong, but everyone would feel that something was just off enough that they weren’t giving all of their attention to the content.
• A simple deliverable doesn’t mean a lack of process. The final outcome may look simple, but this website got the same process as our larger websites. We wireframed, sketched, created multiple design comps, iterated designs, etc. We tried to cheat in our normal Scrum workflow; but that was a failure, and we learned from that. Whether the site is big or small, we’re still professionals, and we are being chosen (even if the client doesn’t realize it) because we have a professional process in place to deliver the best work possible within a set timeframe and budget. You can try to cut corners by removing steps from the process but one of two things will always happen: you deliver a shoddier deliverable than expected, or you realize that you’re about to deliver a shoddy product and have to go back and fix or repeat your normal workflow steps to make it right. If you’re responsible, you at least fallback to option two, but that will cost money out of your pocket. Having failed and chosen option two enough, I can promise that you will eventually learn (quicker if you do post mortems after each project).

Building this small site with room to grow had it’s own challenges compared to bigger sites, but it turned out to be a great experience for our team and the clients. If you find yourself building the same kinds of sites with every project, I recommend seeking out a different kind of client with different needs for a change. Obviously, It never hurts to have a larger pool of clients, and specialization is becoming less profitable for a lot of agencies. More importantly, though, it gives you a different perspective. When I was doing full-time development, learning Ruby greatly improved my PHP code because I had learned a new approach to some of my programming problems. In the same way, my team has a different perspective on process, detail, and growth after this site that we will take into our next project.