Well, here it is.

Even a casual observer will notice it’s a big departure from our last site. We switched from a minimalist approach with animated Flash navigation to a more flexible design that is built to accommodate more content and features. While the old site made an impression as an example of engaging UI design (in this context, “engaging UI design” means “fun to play with”), the new site emphasizes our work and our people. We also incorporated a lot of best-of-breed usability functionality. (Translation: we made it easy to find stuff.)

Behind the scenes is a custom-built Drupal content management system (CMS) that allows non-technical people, such as myself, to update the site with ease. What is a Drupal content management system? For all I know it’s a magic robot living inside the computer. That’s the nice thing about CMS: you don’t have to know how it works to use it. A Drupal CMS also gives us a framework that can grow and change to suit our needs. (In marketing-speak, this is known as a “scalable solution.”)

Websites are best experienced firsthand, but there are a few features worth calling attention to:

What’s new page

Here you will find a variety articles, videos, firm news, and anything else we deem interesting enough to share with the world. Come back often to find new tips on strategy, best practices in design, case studies of our latest work, and video clips of our guest speakers.

M_stream

On the What’s new page, you will also find M_stream, our version of a Twitter feed. M_stream is a glimpse into the hive mind of Methodologie: what we’re reading, what we’re thinking about, and what inspires us. Hello Kitty blogs, photos of unusual typefaces on street signs, comments about a museum exhibit—anything vaguely related to our craft and industry is fair game.

Unlike your average marketing Twitter feed, we set up M_stream to allow anyone at Methodologie to contribute directly. This unfiltered approach encourages spontaneous participation from our crew, who can post whenever they feel like it without getting permission first. As a bonus, the whole office is now producing content that would otherwise be my responsibility. (In the business world, this is called “leveraging staff-generated content into the marketing space.”)

You can also subscribe to the RSS feed or follow M_stream on Twitter.

Links to personal web pages

Snappy bio copy never does a good job of portraying anyone’s personality, no matter how much personality is in the writing. To give staff members an opportunity to represent themselves, we made the blue bar at the foot of each staff page available for links to personal web pages: blogs, Facebook profiles, Flickr pages, Twitter accounts, possibly even LOL cats. (But we hope not.)

People are still warming up to the idea of mixing the personal and the professional in this way, but we figure most of this stuff is just a web search away-we may as well embrace it. (In particular, I recommend checking out John’s Opera Diva website and Minh’s travel videos.)

This feature led to a healthy discussion about what is and is not appropriate to share, culminating in our “share smart” policy. In short, we trust everyone here not to be a moron; therefore, our policy boils down to don’t be a moron.

Take a look around, and let me know what you think.

Bo Gilliland, Marketing Communications Manager

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