11th February 2020 by Chloe Roach
New year, new start! We decided to kick off 2020 by reviewing our own website and thinking about how we’ve evolved over the years. It’s an important piece of work for any organisation to carry out and something I would urge others to do on a regular basis. Sometimes it’s easy to sail off course if you don’t have a strong hand at the helm and an eye on the map!
At Wired Canvas, we regularly update the website by making improvements and adjustments, but this time around it was clear we needed a longer, harder look in the mirror. Was our site helping us to travel in the right direction? Did it still feel like it truly represented us?
We’ve grown up (a bit) in recent years and we have even more confidence in our work and ability to create great websites, brands and designs for our clients. So, we wanted the website to celebrate our strengths and emphasise the importance of our human approach, without being too “I’m a people person (insert heart emoji)” or pompous. In short, we wanted to sound passionate but authentic, and professional but not too cold – and we needed the right kind of imagery to do that as well.
Over the last month I’ve worked a lot on the tone of voice to find the right kind of language and style to express what we do and what makes us special. Words can be slippery, so it’s important to spend some time hitting the right notes linguistically and considering what your audience will make of it.
Our research demonstrated that sometimes people who visited our site weren’t completely clear about what we offered as a design studio, so in addition to adjusting our key messaging and rethinking our language, we also revised our navigation and created an additional page which explicitly says just that. No longer will you think Wired Canvas is a fishmonger my friend!
Visually we made the decision to simplify the look of the site and create a layout that leads the user's eye to important content. It was critical for us to really interrogate our information architecture in order to prioritise what we wanted to say, and there's now a considered unfolding of information as you journey through the new site.
