We’ve created a new Deegloo website and decided to modernize and change a bit of our identity. In the course of six months, this was the second one we’ve pushed out. The first one being Digital Poirots, a project where we introduced our brand related to data.

How did we start?

The whole website design and content creation process can be daunting and challenging. And for us, it really was. If the saying is that Rome wasn’t built in a day, well, a website certainly wasn’t built any quicker. There is a whole series of steps that have to be followed to get certain results.

And so we set off on a journey to wipe out everything that was before and start from scratch. We had the whole mission and vision to define, which as you can assume is not an easy task. There was a certain aim we wanted to achieve and a general idea, but like any creative process, it changed shape over time.

Do the research

First, we started off with research. We had countless meetings, brainstorming sessions, and Slack conversations where it was integral to establish our strategy. The goal was to determine who we are, what are our services and projects, and basically what is our core value proposition. It wasn’t oriented towards our work only, but towards people who are an integral part of our company. We wanted to create a website that would allow our team to easily see and understand our vision and our core values. 

So, what is our focus? What is unique to us that we can offer? 

When we looked at our work and the way we communicated inside the company, it was easy to see that our focus is on complex enterprise web and mobile solutions. Combined with data science and data engineering from our subbrand Digital Poirots, our digital products are solutions that are meant to help companies reach higher levels of operational excellence. This is what makes us different. We love challenging projects on a bigger scale. So why not put it all on our website?! And we did. 

Through the discovery of our core business value proposition, we discovered that we want to direct our brand in the same direction. We wanted to present ourselves as high-quality, professional, and precise, so our logo and color scheme had to follow suit. Simple but impactful was our motto. But more on that later in our upcoming blog post where the design takes the spotlight.

A little bit of spying

After determining what our mission and vision are, it was time to delve deep into research. We spent a lot of time going through the websites of our competitors and others. Not to copy them, but to establish a general sense of what’s hot or not on the market. Or what works for them but wouldn’t for us. We wanted to get inspired and see the differences in style and design. So, IT companies all over, we apologize for that spike in your Google Analytics. 

This only solidified the fact that you should do your research. You’ll get great insights into the whole market and you’ll see which aspects can you use to differentiate yourself. It’s an easy way to get inspired, to find out which keywords are important and which content structures work. 

It helped us also in the SEO department. We realized we don’t want to only be a match for people’s searches, but we also want to be genuine and specific. Keyword stuffing is nobody’s game. From Google Search Console to Business Profile, we had to coordinate it all with our new look and content. But as we all know, it’s an ongoing process and we will continually be working on it.

Let’s talk content

After the initial research, we decided on our sitemap and our main pages and subpages. Each one had a purpose and a message aligned with our tone of voice. User personas were defined, so we could adapt our communication strategy and site usability and flow. With that in mind, we picked what we wanted to focus on and tried to follow design guidelines to accommodate content for the future look of the site. 

With our pages and notes ready, it was time to start writing the content. And, let’s face it, this is the hard part. There were instances where we had one content ready, and a few days later we would change every single word of it. We had ten or twenty different hero texts for one page and then decided on the best one. Sometimes, a sentence was discarded to be put in again. It was a slow process, but one that needed to happen. Some pages were written in a day, and some took us longer. 

Cooperation is key

We worked together with developers to understand each project and what was behind it. It was integral to understand the whole development process to outline what matters the most. Each service was described in a way to showcase our skills and our dedication. Our about us pages were done in a way to outline what’s important to us, and that is people and culture. They are the story of who we are and what we strive for. 

But, the process didn’t go smoothly. Once certain parts of content were written down, some parts had to be discarded to fit in the design. It was a bit of a painful process as well. Any content writer will tell you that once you have this whole idea on paper, it’s hard to let it go sometimes, especially when you are satisfied with it. That’s why it’s important to have good communication with your design team. You have to be in balance to reach cohesiveness on both sides. 

Even when our content and design were done, work didn’t stop there. We had follow-up meetings to discuss the final results. Afterward, it was finetuning and refinements time. And then there was analytics integration, meta descriptions, indexing, checking the links, QA, etc. And finally letting the website go live.

What’s the takeaway?

What we’ve learned from the whole process is that nothing comes easy. Each stage had its difficulties and challenges, which we embraced wholeheartedly. Realization of our vision for the new website and identity took a lot of time, effort, and creativity. We went in with the aim to be unique and bold. And we believe we achieved that. We have a result that represents who we are.

So, let’s redefine the future with bold solutions.