Earlier this month I was approached by our Project Manager and one of our Client Managers here at eClick and was asked what I would think of redesigning the company’s website with complete creative control. The concept would be to leave the “design by committee” behind and give the designer the control over the new sites look, usability, information architecture, and optimization. Between me and one of our front-end developers the entire site will be of one creative direction and vision. No influence from internal or external sources, although we have set up this blog to document the process and accept feedback in the comments. If I see constructive feedback I will take it into account, so please leave your thoughts.
Currently most designers have to deal with comments from clients and internal management. I liken this to television writers having to take notes from executives and advertisers. So I am happy to be note free for the first time, the only exception being my own personal site. This is a calculated risk. The site I design and construct may fall flat, but that is the chance you take and I am happy to take it.
Some background on me…
I got my first domain in 1998 when I left Columbia College Chicago to work and do freelance design. I went back to school in 2003 and finished my BA in new media design. Through the late 1990’s I worked as an artist assistant briefly, where I also taught kid and preteen art classes, and ran a downtown Chicago art supply store. I sold dozens of paintings and mixed media works from 1997 to 2003 and had a few month stay in a Chicago gallery. I worked at a handful of companies doing web design and front-end development through the first part of this decade before ending up at eClick Performance.
I have been working at eClick Performance for three years and have seen the company grow from a few people in a brownstone in the Gold Coast to dozens in a high rise in “The Loop” downtown Chicago. Over the years we worked on designing a new site for the company, but nothing was ever getting through all the departments and management, no one could ever decide on the amount, order and titles of pages, the look and feel of the design, or how to treat the brand, pretty much nothing.
We did finally get a new site up, but as time went on we felt it was lack luster and that it wasn’t performing well at all to generate interest and leads was disappointing. This wasn’t new to me, I have seen beautiful site designed by me with careful planning and construction of page flow, and style guides completely tossed aside by clients and other sticky fingers that like to put their ideas and influence into the project. When I was studying film we learned about the Auteur theory, which is a similar approach.
From Wikipedia: In film criticism, the 1950s-era Auteur theory holds that a director’s films reflect that director’s personal creative vision, as if he were the primary “Auteur” (the French word for “author”). Auteur theory draws on the work of a group of cinema enthusiasts who wrote for the Cahiers du cinéma and argued that films should reflect a director’s personal vision. They championed filmmakers such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir as absolute ‘auteurs’ of their films.
We needed to start again…
Over the next few months I will be posting the process of designing a new web site for eClick Performance, documenting all my thoughts and reasons behind the choices I make and the direction I want to see the site and the brand move. Following that the front-end developer will document his process of building the site, as well as the back-end developer documenting his process for setting up the client login feature. Optimization will be taking place all along the way. Finally we will review and test the site before launching it right after the first of the New Year.
If all goes well the new site will not just look good, feel good to use, but perform better as well.