What is the purpose of a new website?
At ECS, we wanted to make a change and refresh our website since we hadn’t updated it in several years. We also wanted to add new imagery, blog posts, expand our company culture pages, and enhance the information about our service lines and markets across the company.
What are some exciting elements of our new website?
We added a new recruiting portal to highlight our career opportunities. We also expanded the sections regarding community outreach, our company blog and have added video links throughout our site to tell a bigger story about ECS. We like the clean, professional, easy to navigate site, and hope that our clients will enjoy seeing and referring back to it often.
If you are working on a new website, who should be involved?
When working on a new website, or just refreshing your old one, make sure that you have the right team in place before you start. This includes marketing, IT, HR, Recruiting and your web development team. Allow for extra time in the beginning to set up the website framework, new pages and functions that you want the users to see and interact with. Adding them later in the process can be time-consuming and costly.
Thinking about doing a website redesign for your company? Here are some quick tips:
- If you haven’t already done so, create a style guide to be used throughout the redesign for consistency in grammar, punctuation and spelling
- Be sure to have a test site so that you can review as changes are being made
- Engage an internal “review team” to look over the website and assign them specific pages to look for technical, grammatical, and functional errors. It is easier to divide up the review process amongst a team vs. the individuals that have been working on the website all along. Plus, the review team will see the typos quicker since they are looking at the content for the first time.
- Create an internal soft-launch campaign and encourage employees to find typos/linking errors before you launch it externally. Give them an incentive for each typo they find, ex. $10 each.
About the Author:
Tracy Allen is a Vice President and Director of Corporate Marketing for ECS. Over the past 17 years, she has overseen all of the marketing activities for the firm including managing and updating the corporate website, creating all corporate marketing materials (brochures, mailers, press releases), coordinating all corporate trade shows and organizing all the corporate market sector efforts of the 16-person Business Development staff. She has over twenty years of experience in the A/E/C industry and is involved with over ten professional trade associations and participates on the board level for each one. She has her MBA from Marymount University and her BS from Longwood University. She is married and has a nine-year-old daughter.