Let’s Get Dirty: The 2009 Oneupweb Rebrand Process (Week 3)
Welcome back to Let’s Get Dirty: The 2009 Oneupweb Rebrand Process. Follow my musings as I guide you through the entire Oneupweb rebrand and redesign process. It’s an unedited, uncensored view from the inside. And I promise to hold nothing back (at least as long as they let me keep writing this). So please, secure all loose items and keep all parts of your body inside the train at all times.
My brain is a little fried right now. (Seriously, you could scramble some eggs and bacon on it. Mmmmm. Bacon.)
Today we were involved in a few decision making meetings. Basically, we have this really cool website shell, and now we need to find appropriate content to go in it. Oh sure, we have tons of content. But it’s not so much about filling space with stuff we already have as it is strategically placing content where it has the most impact and makes the most sense—and we like fresh content, so that means making new stuff.
A lot easier said than done. It takes a lot of analyzing, a lot of talking about what we do, what people want to know, what people need to know, and how best to highlight our skills and capabilities. So we all sit down—myself, our 4 talented designers, the Director of Marketing, our kickass copywriter and our CEO—who’s pretty cool herself (brownie points!).
Our conference room has this great techie hookup that allows us to view our website, via the internet, on a large flat screen tv (I needed that for the Superbowl! Go Steelers!). So up the website comes, and we go through it page by page, offering ideas, discussing options and finally, making a decision.
Today we were discussing what, other than copy, should live on each individual page. Is it photographs, some sort of flash animation, an actual video, cartoons, logos, case studies, etc.
Spoiler Alert: Our website has a little bit of everything listed above.
I thought it would be really cool if we could have flash animation of an actual library for our whitepapers page. Then people could select their whitepaper/book from the shelves, and it would pull down and open up. Our flash designer wanted to kill me for that one. Another great idea that didn’t make it through was to play off of the fact that all of our newsletters are digital, or “green”.
We also spent a bit of time talking about buttons, such as “Download”, “Subscribe” and “Submit”. We didn’t want any plain old boring buttons. We needed them to have a cool effect. We call it the jelly effect. And the entire conference room erupted into laughter when some unfortunate soul said, “We need more jelly. More jelly!” (It’s amazing how 3 cups of coffee, a slight headache from the big game the night before and a 2-hour long meeting can change the most mature person’s humor to that of a 10-year-old.)
So there’s talking, laughing, hair pulling, decisions made, decisions reversed, final decisions made, and finally, we gave birth to a Oneuplet. Digital style.
And really, the website is starting to come together. I sometimes look back at it, watch a video we created, read some of the content and think—wow, did we really do that? There’s a long way to go, but I don’t look at it so much as a journey as I do an adventure. And I know one thing. The rest is going to be wild.
