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Making MorrisCreative.com: Our Website Design Process

Making MorrisCreative.com: Our Website Design Process

Creating a website for yourself can be a daunting task. Arduous, if you will. When you are in a client-based industry, like marketing and public relations, client work is the lifeblood of your workweek. We plow through tweets, news releases, and design drafts. Yet, when a project comes up for ourselves … the gears seem to slow. Evidence A: Our brand-spanking-new website, MorrisCreative.com.

Since October of 2010, we’ve been simmering this idea of changing our website. We stewed, we met, we conferenced. Ideas were tossed, concepts buried, and sketches scrapped. Then we got busy—on our clients’ marketing programs and projects, not our own website.

It’s hard to work for yourself!

Fast-forward to October 2011. We dug in, and got very serious about creating our new web presence. The initial concept grew from wanting to reflect our new office space in digital form, as well as being mindful of our philosophy of Excellence + Heart + Fun. One of the most critical aspects of our old site was that it didn’t say “Morris Creative Group” any longer; it didn’t reflect our ethos. So, we set out to create a website that would be fresh, clean, and progressive. Also, we wanted to think conceptually about user experience and site structure. Before, our site followed the format of most sites: The viewer sees pages, like a book, in a linear fashion. But, today, you can surf on your phone, on your iPad, or on your TV. Toddlers naturally swipe, scroll, and pinch on Mom and Dad’s iPhones. We have a new relationship with websites and navigation, which we wanted to utilize on our site. So, we are bringing it back biblical-style with more “scrollability,” which you especially notice in the What We Do section.

We’ve had a web presence since the late 1990s. You can check out some antique versions on The Wayback Machine, an internet archive of online goodness. It’s kind of like looking at old high school pictures and wondering why you thought parachute pants and frosted tips were a good idea. It also shows that over time, we all need to rethink and re-evaluate our identity and brands on all platforms.

In the end, the new MorrisCreative.com took a long time to complete because we challenged ourselves. And, thanks to the work of our designers, writers, photographers, and sounding boards, we met our goal.

Does your website reflect the heart of your company? If not, we should talk.

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