Making of: How we created the website

In my case, it meant focusing on writing texts for our clients and their websites. Right from the start, it was clear that my first client would be none other than our own agency. You can probably guess how it all turned out. Therefore, I will describe the journey that led to all of this.

I’m Learning to Fish

Not only PUXdesign is fulfilling wishes with the new website. I am finally managing to take writing in the right direction thanks to the designers from Pábení, specifically Maru (my mentor in writing texts and quality checker of all texts) and Roman (a question machine). From the first meeting, they clearly guide us toward a single goal.

First and foremost, we put together a brief that includes not only the website but also mentoring in writing. We don’t want just that one famous fish, we want to learn how to fish. At the beginning of November, the whole cycle will start, and I go from a workshop to a meeting and back to a workshop. This is called the phase of discovery, during which Pábení gathers information as do we ourselves. At this moment, I know every next step of the entire project, but I still cannot see the whole.

Finding No. 1: Without asking, we won’t write it.

I am working on it....

After two full-day workshops and 5 meetings, we are finishing the discovery phase. We are starting to create a script for interviews with our clients, and I will be asking them at the beginning of December how they see the whole thing. In total, I met with 8 willing and honest people who showed me our collaboration from their perspective, and I gathered a lot of useful material for the website. So, what now?

… I am working on it

With a pile of data, we locked ourselves in a meeting room at HUB, and Roman started assigning tasks. From all the interviews, we first extracted the needs, concerns, and desires exactly as our clients described them. We sorted them into 6 thematic areas, which led us to focus on describing two personas that share some things in common but diverge significantly in others. This gave us an idea of how to approach each page. Specifically, this was reflected on the page:

• How we work , which could easily have 6 points instead of 12, but since we knew that many of our clients are working with a web provider for the first time, we wanted to make our working process as relatable as possible.
• Who we are , which could have looked completely different, but the interviews revealed that our clients significantly perceive Tom as the face of the company and the person who has been communicating with them from the beginning. We built the page around the introduction of three leaders at PUXdesign. 

Finding No. 2: Clients are helping us create our website through interviews.

How we matured the structure

Partially, we built on the original solution and added completely new pages like For Agencies and Partners. At this stage, Maru took the helm and, using a structure full of rough texts, began guiding us toward the goal of our collaboration. Honza Onesork added his magical keywords that help us avoid falling into the depths of internet oblivion. And now, let’s get writing. 

Finding No. 3: Rough texts made us think about what we want to say.

Everything I really needed to know, I learned from Maru

In February and March, I write 3 to 4 days a week in a home environment, still under the regular online supervision of my mentor Maru. We fine-tune page by page, and although we initially imagined it would be faster at PUX, we are discovering firsthand that website texts cannot be written overnight. 

At the moment when we have written the key pages, we prepare a prototype and a script for testing the tone of voice of our texts and the overall logic of the website. We only need the homepage, the How We Work page, a References page with one case study, and a page focused on creating custom e-shops. We test on a sample of 6 people from the industry whom we approached at HUB. We will incorporate the factual feedback and focus on completing the remaining texts.

Finding No. 4: No, we really won't write it all in 4 weeks.

We manage the entire project in Basecamp, which allows everyone to have an overview of what is completed and what is currently being worked on.

Pábení hands over the helm to us

At this moment, Pábení has completed its part of the work, and Maru and Roman helped us kick off the entire project, especially the content creation. We are familiar with everything from graphics onward, so it was up to us to finalize it. We will be quiet for a while as we work on graphics and code. However, our collaboration with Pábení does not end here; on the contrary, it slowly initiates the development of the website and the creation of presentation materials that we send to clients during initial communication.

We have complete freedom in web design

For the graphics, we are finalizing the website prototype and starting the logo redesign. Our website is a celebration of creative freedom that we granted ourselves as both client and supplier. We were very much looking forward to this project because we knew we could really let loose. When our designer Peter presents his minimalist vision for the first two pages to the others, he gets the green light and completes the rest.

Looking back, we realize that many ideas came about quite casually. Work on our website could not disrupt other projects, so we occasionally missed our own internal deadlines. Nevertheless, the result is graphics that delight both us and our clients.

Finding No. 5: This is what graphics look like at first glance.

We are fine-tuning the technical side of the website

Our coders have prepared trump cards that will animate individual graphic elements and refine everything down to the last character of code. While working on our own website, we are creating new quality standards that we want to adhere to in the future. We are trying new things that we will be able to offer to our clients as well.

We are building the website on widgets, which will allow us to create new pages in the future that we did not initially plan. Part of the technical work on the website includes speed optimization (we have 98% from Google), which the coders check daily. Finally, they incorporate the latest SEO recommendations from Honza Onesorek.

The D Day is Here

Finally, the website is ready to launch, and we are showing it to the world for the first time on July 1st. We are patting ourselves on the back, happy that we made it to the finish line and have something to showcase to our clients again.

The next day, we inform our surroundings about the launch to gather feedback and fine-tune the website as much as possible. At that moment, we already see many other goals that we set during the website's implementation. These include launching the English version of the website, finalizing the corporate visual style, and continuously strengthening SEO.

Finding No. 6: Just wondering if those goals for the end of the year were a bit too many :)

And what’s next?

We have a well-developed website that we really like and want to continue to develop. But it wasn't free. It involved hundreds of hours of work. The first step towards the development of the website has already been taken. It is this blog, so follow us.

PS: Our website celebrated success in the fall of 2017 among professionals in the competition WebTop100. In the IT and digital agency category, we won bronze for the website! Thank you.