When I started this creative digital agency 14 years ago I made a promise to myself that we would never become one of those agencies that were too busy for marketing their own brand.
Throughout the years we've been able to hold to that promise by innovating, staying relatable, hiring people who love what they do and keeping the Harlo brand fresh.
With little time and minimal resources here's how we approached making our site.
Brand First
We began first with taking a hard look at who we are today. Asking questions, like why do we exist, are we doing what we love, do our clients like us, do we like them, are we creating meaningful work and why do we come to work every day. These were just a few questions we asked ourselves during the brand dive. At the end of the exercise, we not only redefined who we are today, we also gained the knowledge and language needed to communicate who we are to the world beyond our walls.
Brand Strategy Outputs
- Brand Guide
- Brand Voice & Tone
- Mission Statement
- Value Proposition
- Core Values
- Tagline
- Logo Refresh
Implementing Strategy & Following The Process
Through the years, we've developed a process for building websites and digital products. The process utilizes a strategy first approach and benefits us on every project we manage. Naturally, it made sense to use the process we depend on daily for building digital products. A strategy was used for defining the brand tone and voice which lead content direction and user experience. We took an internal vow to keep it simple and did everything in our means to hold to that, of course, there were setbacks along the way but in the end, we were happy with the result.
What We Did
- Followed A Process
- Developed Strategy (Content, Digital & Brand)
- Sitemap
- UX/UI Architecture
- Wire Framing
- Mood Boarding
- Design Pattern Library
Making Time, Allocating Resources & Management Tools
Carving out time to design and develop our website was a big task. So much a task it eventually took us an entire year to get it launched for its inaugural birth to the world wide web. I'm here to tell you the struggle is real, and the time logged well surpassed 300 hours, divided amongst 10 team members and two States. I guess we could have outsourced it to save time, but that would have been hypocrisy in its truest form and we would have missed out on the journey.
We made our site build possible by dividing tasks among team members and using good collaboration tools for project management and documentation. We also followed a schedule and if a deadline was pushed back we'd make sure that would not turn into a perpetual cycle.
Resources And Tools We Used
- Schedule
- Invision
- CardSmith
- Basecamp
- Harvest
- Google Apps
- Sketch
If you want to know more about our creative digital services feel free to contact us here: winhearts@harlointeractive.com
