Fall Back in Love with Your Website

Newfangled has been developing websites pretty much since they've been around. We've lived through and seen the good, the bad and the very ugly. Years ago I hired a consultant who asked me to identify the best projects, or the best client relationships we'd had. At that time I struggled to think of even one project that I could say was fun, effective, and profitable. The best I could do was to identify ones that were the least painful, or had some any upside to them. This review of our history, while not producing the intended results, did set my mind to examining the reasons and roots of why this had been our experience. This lead to the book we wrote Client vs. Developer Wars.

But this newsletter is not about rehashing the ugly history of past failures! It's about hope, it's about peace, it's about reconciling, and moving on to maturity. It's about the potential that exists for true love to exist between an agency and its website. I am being overly melodramatic here. But let me share a bit about what the web has become for us, and perhaps you'll be provoked to seek reconciliation yourself. And if you are ready to come back to your website, we're ready to be a counselor, and work through the specific changes and adjustments that will be necessary to rekindle the love. As such, we are now offering a website reconciliation package to partner advertising agencies and design firms. We'll describe this more at the end of this newsletter.


I will now risk the danger of boasting and take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of our new Newfangled website. Everything I describe about our site will be made available to you in the agency website offer we're making.

Before we look behind-the-scenes, let me describe a bit of the process we went through to design and develop our new site. We decided to practice what we preach and begin our new site using a grayscreen prototype. If you were to compare our initial prototype to our final site, you would hardly recognize one from the other. For weeks we reworked and reworded our prototype until it began to fit our new message. The prototyping process itself causes us to think more deeply and refine more thoroughly the message and positioning of our new site. If we had built our site based on our original ideas that were represented in the original prototype we would not have nearly the refined message that we ended up establishing.

Dave Mello began building the whitescreen for our site. With the whitescreen in place, I was able to begin entering the content I'd been working on. I had already written much of the content while prototyping, and we were going to reuse much of our old site's content. Nevertheless, once I began reading my copy in the context and flow of our new site I realized it needed a lot of work. I must have written and rewritten every page on the site at least a half dozen times. The whitescreen allowed me to enter it directly into the site so I had the flexibility to refine my words as much as I needed.

After setting on a design we "skinned" the whitescreen as I continued to enter the content the site morphed itself into its final look and feel. Of course, I still had a lot of work to do writing and refining copy throughout the site. When I was done, the site went live.