We’re working on recreating our website over the next few months. I decided to take a few minutes on a cold Saturday afternoon to peruse a few random agency websites for inspiration.
On the current launchpadadvertising.com
What really surprised me – despite the tremendous differences across sites one particular section of many sites seemed to be created by the same person. The agency process. This brilliant “secret sauce of success” that shops spend so much time perfecting is literally the same for nearly everyone. Oh, we all put different names on it, change of the graphic a bit (circles are very popular) and often give theirs really special names. But guess what… It’s the same stuff. We all start with an understanding of your business. Where else would we start? Launchpad’s current site is just as guilty, which is a shame given how many hours my partner and I spent on that one page.
So if we all do things pretty much the same way, how can clients looking for the perfect fit really gauge an agency’s ability to drive their business? Step back from the fluff and focus less on the process itself and more on the agency’s people and their ability to really execute. Four key questions come to mind:
- Do they actually have backgrounds that enable them to really understand your business?
- How do they approach solving problems and does it match your own desires?
- How do they define great creative and do they really have the chops to deliver it?
- Do they have real examples of not just tracking results but actually delivering insights that led to real changes in direction?
If you find an agency that can deliver against these four questions, you’ve likely found the right one for you.
Also, you can bet we’ll be rethinking the “how we work” page on our site very soon!
-Scott
Great point! I feel like you can take agency websites and put them into three or four big categories:
a) The Flash monster. Many shops that pride themselves on their creativity feel like they must have a flash intro that looks like it was designed by Dali playing with an 8-bit color scheme. It certainly makes the point that they’re creative, but it also says out loud the underlying suffix “but we might be creative at the cost of other things.”
b) The Empire Builder. Hi! Want to send us an email? Choose from any of our fifty billion offices. We won’t say which office does which account, and we won’t let you send it to a central address for one of our people to forward it to the right place. If you want to do anything at all, you’ll have to pick an office by continent, country, state. Leo Burnett manages to combine this with a).
c) The Overly Social. I absolutely love Twitter, but the overly social agency site will take the idea of spreadable media a bit too far. Right on their intro page they’ll have a YouTube playlist that plays automatically and without permission, a constantly-updated Twitter feed that’s scrolling faster than you can read something that’s in your periphery, and maybe the bandcamp page of the hip hop band from creative. I’m a big fan of sites that do social well, and there are many of those. But the Overly Social is a stranger who hugs you at a bar.
d) The Barely There. Of all the ways an agency site can go wrong, I feel like this is the most forgivable. If a potential client is looking at an agency’s website, then she or he must be acquainted with the process and work already. I don’t think that the website is the first or main or only thing a client looks at in choosing to contact an agency. For small agencies, this is doubly true. And a minimally informative website means that the people are too busy doing actual work. But I’m admittedly biased–I’ve seen several agencies with fantastic work and minimal websites.
e) The Perfection. Blogs and Twitter feeds are easy to find but unobtrusive at the same time. There’s no Flash except in showcasing interactive work, which actually animates. The agency is willing, or even better, eager to discuss how they are dedicated to creating long-term growth over, say, bragging about their Klout score. The layout is clear and web 2.0 without being blocky. The color scheme isn’t dull but doesn’t hurt your eyes. Ahhh. So beautiful.