The Most Radical Website We’ve Ever Designed
Video overview
The first webpage went up August 6, 1991 — 30 years ago and we published our new Orbis website on the anniversary of that historical event, last Friday, August 6, 2021.
I started building websites professionally in May of 1995 and our new website is the most radical design of any site I’ve worked on in 26 years.
Before I describe that design, I should start with our core mission which is building audiences. Or even better: building friendships.
I like that much better than “Marketing” because let's face it: many feel marketing is inherently evil.
Building an audience suggests an ongoing relationship and an ongoing relationship requires constant nurturing.
So, how do we build audiences? The answer is Content.
And what has 99% of my clients struggled with over the past 23 years? You guessed it. Producing ongoing content.
Everyone will set aside budget and gather the troops and focus on a campaign or build a new website but pretty much nobody builds a marketing plan around reaching out to their audiences weekly.
Or if they do, they do it for a little while and then stop. And then nothing for years.
Now there are a lot of organizations who do post to social media weekly or regularly, but as one client once described it — “sure we get a lot of likes, but none of those are tuning into sales”.
And to that end, I like to remind people that you should view your social media as: what would you do if it disappeared tomorrow?
There’s a lot to cover on how or why that could happen. Just know that you don’t own your audience on social media, you’re only leasing it.
Your website should be your home base. Your content base. Your complete content base.
You should be doing everything you can to get people to your website. Through social media and email campaigns. Get someone to your site and then get them to contact you.
At the very least get their email address — that’s an asset you can also own — your email list. And what should you be doing with your list? Reaching out and driving that list to your website regularly.
Gobs of Content
So, what does a website look like when it’s a wellspring of content?
Maybe a better way to look at it is
what does a website look like when it’s super easy to add tons of content day in and day out?
News Sites
Lets look at the news
My news consumption has typically been Google News which curates from several different news sources, with the thinking that I would get the most rounded and balanced view on current events.
One day I wondered how a more “designed” news experience might feel and I decided who better than Apple in the study of “content packaging” from a variety of news sources and brands?
I jumped into Apple News and saw immediately how stripped down the interface was in service of the content.
Just like a typical website landing page, there are the top stories, engaging visuals and headlines and sections that are easily denoted.
There’s advertising and calls to action but again, the interface is minimal.
And by interface, I mean everything that’s not the content. The navigation, the typography, the colors.
Most everything in Apple News is in black & white and gray scale.
Aside from the images, colors are reserved primarily for branding the sources and highlighting the sections.
I then decided to search for “best news website designs”.
Not only was the Apple News Design consistent with many of the trending designs, one site stood out in particular:
The New York Times Corporate Site.
Now this is not the regular New York Times news site but it’s their corporate website at NYTCO.com.
This site takes the Apple Design up a notch. There’s no color in the interface what-so-ever. It’s black and white, big visuals and short headlines.
Clean and easy to read typography.
The only color you see is in the pictures. Not even the links or buttons are colored. The content is so well laid out, you don’t need color to tell you what’s clickable — it’s just super clear.
And what is driving this pure and clean design?
How about their headline:
“We seek truth and help people understand the world”
Wikipedia’s “Journalism Ethics and Standards” gets to the core of what I think they are saying:
"Journalism's codes of ethics are intended to ensure reliability of reported information by defining acceptable practices; and provide guidelines about circumstances to avoid that could interfere with, or appear to interfere with, the reliability of reported information."
An unbranded interface.
And that’s where the epiphany came — Orbis, as a brand and a vehicle for content about marketing should be as neutral as possible without me trying to rub a brand all over it.
And that, is the mistake I have been making for the past 23 years.
As soon as I committed to a no branding approach, the content never looked better or was easier to produce and publish to the site.
I’ve never worked with a client or a design that was 100% black and white.
This is truly a first and I think you can see how this is more than a design aesthetic. It’s an architecture that attempts to drive integrity.
And that’s part one of the radical design.
The second part is in the number of pages in the site: Four.
A home page, a blog, an e-commerce page and a style guide.
From a marketing standpoint, it’s really just 2 pages: a home page and a blog.
While there is no limit to the number of blog posts — i.e. thousands, tens of thousands, the key is all content is divided amongst blog posts, tagged and categorized and then surfaced to the home page and then each other (i.e. see also).
Imagine if you had a website with say 2500 pages. Your traditional top navigation doesn’t cut it.
Top navigation and dropdown links are a rigid vestige of the early web and its nascent design and for some reason still hanging on for deer life.
Think more like Youtube where your start page points you in a direction and then the related or see also content keeps you going in that direction.
Think Instagram and tags for organizing content.
Tagging and Categorizing are really the ultimate navigation.
You can create these content structures completely on the fly thereby forming little mini content universes.
With all of that out of the way, it’s finally about the content.
I’m as guilty as most marketers growing up with the internet where anything has been possible.
It has literally taken me 23 years to get over trying to make my content blow people away by getting creative with the vehicle that is the website.
It’s why I now like to describe our website product as everything BUT the website.
When the website is simple, the navigation easy and the content quick to load, you can focus on the really important audience building tools: The writing, the photography, the videos, the podcasts.
Most every client I’ve worked with can use a design that centers on content.
But for good reason, most have winced at the thought of trying to produce lots of blog posts every month. The websites of the past 30 years just have never supported that idea.
But I implore you to think big without limits.
If the content production tools continue to decrease in cost like they have over the past several years, imagine creating thousands of posts with ease.
How do you catalog all of that?
I believe we have the solution and at a price most any small business can afford.
Please be sure to visit our Hypersite Product post to learn more.
I’m going to go back to that New York Times Headline and change it a little:
“We seek truth and help small businesses understand Marketing”
I this new site design does a lot more than look good.
I hope you find it as an indispensable resource for your marketing strategy
and it’s a welcome and enjoyable experience exploring and learning from the mountains of content I plan on producing for you.
Sources
Wikipedia Marketing Ethics
Psychology Today: Marketing Is Evil
Seth Godin: Is Marketing Evil
Wikipedia: Journalism ethics and standards
