Grains of sand: Playing in the sandbox

For developers, like for kids, a sandbox is a safe place to play around and try new things. We have recently used our website as our own sandbox. You may remember our newsletter in May which announced the new Grain website. It was a major redesign after the last version of the site which we had designed and developed in 2011, which feels like a decade ago in digital years!

The new site brought our work front and centre – after all, following the strategic stages, most of our final output is visual and it’s important to show that off. The new home page offered a tantalising look at all of our recent projects, with a left-hand menu showing a full list of cross-referenced clients, sectors and design disciplines accessible with just one click. Another major change was to make the site responsive to cater to our 15% and growing smartphone and tablet audience.

What we didn’t expect was for Google to penalise the number of links on the home page, and our traffic soon dipped. Over time Google ‘reasons’ more and more like a human being and seeing so many clients, sectors and design disciplines made Google ask the same thing as our clients do: what ties everything together? The answer is: branding for entrepreneurially-minded businesses.

This concise answer had to be reflected in a simpler home page with fewer links, which Google could glance at and grasp immediately. So after the full redesign in the spring, we created a new home page in August. The page showing all our work and sectors covered is now the Work page with a much simpler home page greeting visitors, and Google.

As a design consultancy, creating our own website is one of our most challenging projects – client work always takes priority. Yet to excel at the service we offer, we need to be our own toughest critics.

The new streamlined home page works like a dream, with our website traffic higher than it has ever been. We find about a third to half of our new business through the website, and then many of those clients turn into long-term partnerships, so we rely heavily on our own SEO, as well as being a service that we offer to our clients.

This year has seen a marked increase in our own social media activity as well as managing our clients’ social media strategy and content. In this Thoughts section, we strive to give insight into branding, entrepreneurship, our own business, and creativity.

Feedback on the new, and newer, website from clients has been overwhelmingly positive, and now Google agrees too. We enjoyed our time and learned quite a lot in the Grain sandbox.