Eating Our Own Dog Food

One thing we preach to our clients is the need for an iterative approach to the development of websites.   Too many organizations neglect their website for long periods, and then launch a major redesign project every three or four years that ends up monopolizing staff resources and breaking the bank.   Assuming the site is on solid technical ground, developing iteratively by making frequent, small improvements is a much more manageable approach.   We decided to eat our own dog food and apply our philosophy to our own website.

The current version of www.bivings.com has been up for over a year, and everyone at The Bivings Group was anxious to start making improvements.    We were happy with the Content Management System we were using (Drupal) and thought the overall site design had held up well.  We wanted to make a series of refinements as opposed to completely overhauling the site.

So we decided to redesign the site section-by-section.  Instead of making all our improvements at once, we created 3-4 smaller projects that could each be accomplished in a few days time.  Late last week, we decided to start with our homepage. 

Our old homepage featured a Flash branding element that we all agreed had worn out its welcome.  We feel the best way to tell the story of our firm is to show our work, so we wanted project samples to be the first thing people see when coming to the site.  These examples will introduce visitors to our various practice areas.  We also wanted to move away from using Flash generally so that our site would render better on the iPad, iPhone, etc.

The old homepage featured three columns of news items at the bottom of the page.  It was too much.  Google Analytics showed us that because we were providing so much news, users were overwhelmed and not clicking on any of it.  We think by more prominently featuring fewer items we’ll see better results.  If we don’t, we’ll tweak some more.

You can see before and after shots below, and can check out the site live here.  Look for more improvements in the coming weeks.

Let us know what you think.