dt gets a brand new face

Yes, it’s been way too long. Yes, the agency’s website is the last priority. And yes, we finally updated our website design.

We decided to go with an organic look and feel. This time, our website is a work in process – we plan to update and tweak the design and code on a daily basis. Hopefully this will heal the wounds of the past inflicted by poor website hygiene and maintenance. Hello Futurama, goodbye That 70′s show.

We decided that it was time to incorporate some of the design style and programming that we perform for our clients into our own website. Novel idea, eh? This is actually version 3.0. If you check dt out on the Way Back Machine you will see that our past designs are conveniently disguised with missing flash and images. So in an attempt to poke fun at ourselves, we are providing our high school and college website snapshots.

June 1st, 2001 our first functional website went live. Yellow was “in” for version 1.0. Actually, we had the only yellow website on the web at that time, so we just acted like it was “in.” Built with Homesite and Flash 4, this website had versions that went from a hideous browser-sizing pop-up to a relaxed SEO-friendly site with our patented page realization lift (Wikipedia definition on the way).

In July of 2004, version 2.0 appeared. We focused on a peaceful design and axed all the Flash for SEO ranking. This website was originally built in tables with minor .CSS. It was then converted to web standards W3C Strict with a SEO-friendly AJAX navigation system.

In conclusion, I don’t suggest following our previous bad habits of snail’s pace updates on your own website. Instead, I suggest the new path that we have chosen – constant improvement. You should be updating your website once a week. Keep your eyes peeled on your analytics. Pay attention to your bounce and conversion rates. If your tracking software has an overlay feature, review your visitors’ behavior and make changes to improve your user interface and to increase the effectiveness of your website. Check out Crazy Egg for detailed user behavior with heatmaps and fancy overlays.

Your company changes and grows on a weekly or monthly basis – so should your website. A large part of your customers’ decision making process is based on the combined personality of your company. So put your website through the personal growth program and be yourself.