10.29.14

These days, the first thing someone does to find out about an organization, company or issue is look it up online. This makes an organization’s, or person’s web presence vitally important.  At Blue Engine, we just went through a website redesign. More than simply wanting a modern design, we wanted our website to better reflect our growing business and the cutting-edge digital and public affairs tactics we are implementing for our clients.  Throughout the process, we followed four guidelines integral to any new website creation or refresh of an old one:

Language fits your form – When thinking about communicating online, it isn’t just the verbal construct you have to think about, it is also important to analyze how it fits on a screen and if people are going to take the time to read through it.  On our new site, we changed our former ICYMI, Keeping Track and Blue Engine news sections to allow us more room for creativity, images and a new name – Insights and Industry News.

Emphasizing Images  – With image sharing easier and more popular than ever, everyone is a photographer. With cell phone cameras becoming more sophisticated and social channels like Instagram and Pinterest taking off, images are more important to brands and storytelling as ever.  Older sites are often text-heavy, nowadays, as we learn more about how people interact with a website, we know that a more compelling way to tell your story, and captivate your audience is through images.  For this reason, our new site’s top banner has a video instead of a still image.  We’re proud of our team, and wanted to showcase Blue Engine in a way that was dynamic and engaging.

Integrating social media – Social media can help brands, companies and people interact with their audiences and connect more deeply. Candidates running for office connect with voters and corporations respond to customers instantly, and socially. Our site does not include a scrolling bar of our social media feeds, but that doesn’t mean that we didn’t think about social media in all aspects of the site.  In Meet the Team section of our site, we’ve connected each employee’s social media, from Twitter to LinkedIn and Facebook. This helps our audience get to know our staff and show that each of us has a voice and presence beyond the drafted content of a bio.  We also made sure that in our News & Insights, we included the ability for viewers to share content socially and again, a link to the individual author’s Twitter profile. This opens doors for Blue Engine to broaden its reach, and that was important to us when refreshing our site.

Mobile first – Everyone is on a mobile device these days, from iPhones to tablets people are accessing websites from all over the place.  According to research from Cisco, within the next five years mobile traffic will be the majority of traffic to websites.  While it might not be the majority now, it certainly is a large party of traffic.  We made the Blue Engine site fully responsive so that the site accommodated browser size and speed so our content isn’t lost based on the device.