The shoe is on the other foot – launching our new website!!

After a day of final tweaking, snagging and perfecting, our new website www.mzuridesign.co.uk finally went live this evening! Hurrah! A huge sigh of relief was expelled by the whole team who have endured several months of intense development of the site after about 2 years in the ‘planning stages’. Many an evening and weekend have been spent busily preparing case study information, service summaries, loading and tagging images and optimising every page etc; jobs which somehow never seemed to get done during working hours as we were doing ‘our day jobs’ working on client projects.

So, the shoe was very much on the other foot and it has given me really useful insight into the process of website development from the other side!! So here are my three top tips when approaching a major website development or re-development:

1) Take a team approach – The whole team at Mzuri have worked tirelessly to get the new website live. We split the work as equally as we could between us to keep workloads manageable. When it came to photography, we called in the professionals – in our case photographer Michel Focard – to shoot our portfolio for us. After 2 days hard graft by our work experience student Heather, collating our portfolio into an organised collection spanning 4 archive boxes, I hit Michel’s studio in Petersfield and together we shot pretty much the entire portfolio in a 7-hour session. We could not have done it without him; thank you Michel! www.focard.co.uk.

2) Start a wish list – think of your website not just as a one off project, but as a continually developing marketing tool for your business. It is inevitable that you will continue to come up with a great idea the moment it goes live; a new bit of content, a new product etc. Don’t worry about it! Embrace the work you have done so far and start a wish list of ‘Phase II developments’ so you can keep your site evolving. Set aside regular time in your diary to review the site once it is live and make those new development ideas a reality. We’ve already got a healthy list of things we’ll be working on over the coming months, so watch this space!

3) Just do it! I can honestly say the best thing about the shoe being on the other foot is how amazing it feels to launch our new website. We love what we do and the clients we work with and our new website not only helped us to take some time to remember all the projects we’ve been lucky to be involved with, it also enables us to show more people what we are capable of so in turn we can work with more companies doing what we do best. My only regret is that I wish we’d done it a year ago! So, if you’ve been putting it off, just do it!