Website Strategy and Design for Finished Art, Inc.

Objective

Fin­ished Art was con­sid­er­ing cre­at­ing a blog, but the com­pa­ny was not sure whether it was worth the effort or how the blog would actu­al­ly work. Dur­ing some free time, I decid­ed to sit down and think about whether a blog could be a good idea for the com­pa­ny and what ben­e­fits and chal­lenges it could bring.

I pre­sent­ed the strat­e­gy for a web­site redesign to the Pres­i­dent of Fin­ished Art, Inc., then I began spear­head­ing the web­site redesign and the cre­ation of the new blog.

Process

I first thought about three basic things:

• why cre­ate a blog?
• what con­tent could be includ­ed?
• who could con­tribute & how?

The dif­fer­ent back­grounds, inter­ests and tal­ents of each mem­ber of the Fin­ished Art team is what sets this com­pa­ny apart from oth­er small agen­cies. It is one thing the company’s pres­i­dent, Don­na John­ston, is very proud of and fre­quent­ly talks about. I quick­ly real­ized that FA’s cur­rent site did not ade­quate­ly high­light this array of tal­ent – in fact, there was not a page list­ing capa­bil­i­ties or even descrip­tions asso­ci­at­ed with port­fo­lio images.

I want­ed to find a bet­ter way to share this diver­si­ty and pas­sion with FA’s clients and poten­tial new busi­ness part­ners, as well as give each team mem­ber the oppor­tu­ni­ty to grow and explore his/her inter­ests. The addi­tion of a blog was the per­fect way to accom­plish this.

How­ev­er, instead of just cre­at­ing a blog as a sep­a­rate enti­ty, I knew it would be bet­ter to redesign FA’s entire site to improve user expe­ri­ence, max­i­mize client inter­ac­tion and pro­mote the Fin­ished Art brand. It would also improve Search Engine Opti­miza­tion.

I looked at web­sites and blogs from oth­er design agen­cies I admire in order to pin­point what ele­ments from those sites would be ben­e­fi­cial for FA. After a cou­ple months of man­age­ment meet­ings, con­tent cre­ation, and cod­ing, the web­site is now up and run­ning at finishedart.com.

Design

FA’s orig­i­nal site had a won­der­ful min­i­mal­ist design that fea­tured large prod­uct shots, but it just was not work­ing any­more. The site did not have any real con­tent, and the con­tact info and about sec­tion were just sin­gle para­graphs drop­ping down from the accor­dion nav­i­ga­tion on the left side. The new site still fea­tures large prod­uct shots, but project descrip­tions are also includ­ed in the right col­umn. The port­fo­lio is now a sep­a­rate sec­tion of the site, dis­played in a thumb­nail gallery with cat­e­gories for reor­ga­ni­za­tion. Some projects are housed in more than one cat­e­go­ry because many times a project’s deliv­er­ables cross into dif­fer­ent areas of design.

Users can now leave com­ments about work, share FA’s projects, or like posts on face­book direct­ly from the site.

Oth­er areas of the site include:

• a team page with bios and car­i­ca­tures that were made of each employ­ee over the past few years
• an about page includ­ing a brief overview of what FA does, com­pa­ny his­to­ry, and an archive of images of the hol­i­day cards the com­pa­ny sends out every year
• a ser­vices page with direct links to port­fo­lio items cor­re­spond­ing with the ser­vice cat­e­gories
• the blog page
• a con­tact page, now with a google map and sim­ple con­tact form

Outcomes

My hope was to give each employ­ee the chance to be cre­ative in their down­time and be involved in shap­ing the direc­tion of new busi­ness. Ide­al­ly, the posts they pub­lish could intrigue a poten­tial client, then they could get the chance to work on a project relat­ed to their inter­ests.

So far, artists are already being fea­tured on the new blog and there is a sense of excite­ment in the office. One cowork­er even stretched out a can­vas to paint for the first time in years because he felt inspired.

I can’t wait to see more art­work fea­tured on the site, and I look for­ward to get­ting feed­back from some of FA’s clients.