Undertaking a website project of any kind is often a challenge, a journey, and importantly a gauntlet of validation for brand values and lofty philosophical concepts. It’s a complex puzzle that requires a significant amount of thought, iteration, and management—of opinions, feedback, and the ever-present strategy pivot consideration. Often, it unfolds into a web (very bad pun, apologies) of even more questions.
So, you may ask, why take on this project for ourselves? There was no getting around it: It was time.
Our Creative Services department identified some needs in conjunction with the rest of our G&G crew, and some casual conversations were had over time. Understanding that while our previous site was functional, it fell short of showcasing our full talents and abilities. Eventually those conversations snowballed into a concrete starting line, and the team got excited to run the race with a G&G pinnie on our backs.
We initiated the project by outlining goals, pulling in key internal stakeholders to align on a focused set of things we wanted to accomplish. Those were:
Feeling good about this, we moved into a few brand exercises as an entire company to pin down some choices about brand voice and to narrow the mood of our website. This largely came in a series of polls—”Good & Gold is informed and accessible and is not pretentious or complicated”—that we then distilled to some throughlines. For some additional conceptual thought (and maybe a little fun), we also asked everyone to choose a building that represented the brand.
All of these exercises helped us confidently approach a consensus tonally, and we next needed to extend that feeling visually.
Pulling all of the information on emotional cues and strategic planning we had on hand, our next move was to begin our standard process for website projects, beginning with moodboards. Here, our research yielded a lot of observations about where we wanted to take things: minimal with an infusion of color, current via typeface and size choices, no flagrantly loud illustrations but definitely some excitement through scale relationships.
Moodboarding is a highly valued part of our process. It allows us to minimize dissonance and creates the beginnings of a clear roadmap. We’re able to make some firm decisions up front that saves us time later.
Naturally, the step after is to begin wireframing to further lock in specifics. “How will this content be delineated across this flow?” “Where are we focusing a user’s attention?” and “What does this look like scaled to different screens?” are all questions we ask during this period. It’s incredibly important to us to land with a layout framework that’s well-defined so we can move into development with clear specifications.
After iterating through several wireframe versions, and with more granular details like element states and interaction notes documented, we tackled the build.
Our team makes a serious point to keep an eye on emerging platforms and new tools to help improve efficiency and our ability to generate MVPs quickly (we just switched everyone to Figma, for instance). What unveiled itself during our discovery phase was the desire to rapidly iterate in something closer to a live environment, with the added need of control over technical bells and whistles for animations and layouts. Serendipitously, Webflow reminded us of its existence at the perfect time and, having toyed with the idea previously, we knew it was ideal for taking our site to launch.
Webflow allowed us to implement the different responsive variations needed for our design without needing to extend ourselves into by-hand development. As a lean team and organization, the ability to leverage a no-code platform greatly sped up the pen-to-paper parts of the build and we could validate sections on the fly. Personally, the previously mentioned control proved to be incredibly empowering.
On the management side, it has a fantastic CMS that let us model and reference different datasets, all of which can be edited by other team members in an easy-to-use editor interface, meaning we can truly work in a distributed way.
With all stakeholders on board, all team members providing their final feedback, and having finally stepped away from our own design microscopes, we’ve officially shipped the very website you’re reading this on. We had a profoundly productive time working on this new website and are incredibly proud of the work. We hope you enjoy it!
Note: This overall experience has pushed Webflow to the near top of our recommended platforms (Shopify still holds the e-commerce crown…for now), and since we’ve run the gauntlet ourselves, we’d love to take you on that journey as well.
Hear ye, hear ye! In a perfectly awkward virtual ceremony in February, Good & Gold picked up three honors from the American Marketing Association's MAX Awards. Here's a closer look at the awards, and the work that earned them.
In the Email Category, we earned a prize for our work on Oak & Oscar's automated email series. The overview: Through thorough discovery and research, we developed an email automation program designed to deliver thoughtful content to discerning customers at just the right time for independent watch company Oak & Oscar. SEE THE CASE STUDY >
In the Website Category, we won for our redesign and migration of the Infinity Images website. The overview: Though Infinity Images produces world-class, innovative work, the brand’s website felt dated, cluttered, and unprofessional. With our website redesign and migration, we aimed to more successfully communicate the brand’s identity—and most importantly, its capabilities—while also exuding a high level of sophistication and polish. SEE THE CASE STUDY >
Finally, we won Best In Show, a category we did not know existed, but sure makes us feel like an overly proud show dog!
While winning awards is nice, what's really great is being forced to step back and recognize our team's tireless hard work, and the success that it's brought to our clients—brands we wholeheartedly support and believe in. In a year without much reason to celebrate, little nods like this feel especially nice. Hats off, Team Good & Gold!
Undertaking a website project of any kind is often a challenge, a journey, and importantly a gauntlet of validation for brand values and lofty philosophical concepts. It’s a complex puzzle that requires a significant amount of thought, iteration, and management—of opinions, feedback, and the ever-present strategy pivot consideration. Often, it unfolds into a web (very bad pun, apologies) of even more questions.
So, you may ask, why take on this project for ourselves? There was no getting around it: It was time.
Our Creative Services department identified some needs in conjunction with the rest of our G&G crew, and some casual conversations were had over time. Understanding that while our previous site was functional, it fell short of showcasing our full talents and abilities. Eventually those conversations snowballed into a concrete starting line, and the team got excited to run the race with a G&G pinnie on our backs.
We initiated the project by outlining goals, pulling in key internal stakeholders to align on a focused set of things we wanted to accomplish. Those were:
Feeling good about this, we moved into a few brand exercises as an entire company to pin down some choices about brand voice and to narrow the mood of our website. This largely came in a series of polls—”Good & Gold is informed and accessible and is not pretentious or complicated”—that we then distilled to some throughlines. For some additional conceptual thought (and maybe a little fun), we also asked everyone to choose a building that represented the brand.
All of these exercises helped us confidently approach a consensus tonally, and we next needed to extend that feeling visually.
Pulling all of the information on emotional cues and strategic planning we had on hand, our next move was to begin our standard process for website projects, beginning with moodboards. Here, our research yielded a lot of observations about where we wanted to take things: minimal with an infusion of color, current via typeface and size choices, no flagrantly loud illustrations but definitely some excitement through scale relationships.
Moodboarding is a highly valued part of our process. It allows us to minimize dissonance and creates the beginnings of a clear roadmap. We’re able to make some firm decisions up front that saves us time later.
Naturally, the step after is to begin wireframing to further lock in specifics. “How will this content be delineated across this flow?” “Where are we focusing a user’s attention?” and “What does this look like scaled to different screens?” are all questions we ask during this period. It’s incredibly important to us to land with a layout framework that’s well-defined so we can move into development with clear specifications.
After iterating through several wireframe versions, and with more granular details like element states and interaction notes documented, we tackled the build.
Our team makes a serious point to keep an eye on emerging platforms and new tools to help improve efficiency and our ability to generate MVPs quickly (we just switched everyone to Figma, for instance). What unveiled itself during our discovery phase was the desire to rapidly iterate in something closer to a live environment, with the added need of control over technical bells and whistles for animations and layouts. Serendipitously, Webflow reminded us of its existence at the perfect time and, having toyed with the idea previously, we knew it was ideal for taking our site to launch.
Webflow allowed us to implement the different responsive variations needed for our design without needing to extend ourselves into by-hand development. As a lean team and organization, the ability to leverage a no-code platform greatly sped up the pen-to-paper parts of the build and we could validate sections on the fly. Personally, the previously mentioned control proved to be incredibly empowering.
On the management side, it has a fantastic CMS that let us model and reference different datasets, all of which can be edited by other team members in an easy-to-use editor interface, meaning we can truly work in a distributed way.
With all stakeholders on board, all team members providing their final feedback, and having finally stepped away from our own design microscopes, we’ve officially shipped the very website you’re reading this on. We had a profoundly productive time working on this new website and are incredibly proud of the work. We hope you enjoy it!
Note: This overall experience has pushed Webflow to the near top of our recommended platforms (Shopify still holds the e-commerce crown…for now), and since we’ve run the gauntlet ourselves, we’d love to take you on that journey as well.
Last month was our big digital conference month, with Carrie attending the Digital Summit in Portland and Spencer attending MozCon in Seattle. Afterward, we were buzzing around on Slack with a million ideas, not only for our clients but for internal solutions as well. We want to share all the exciting presenters and big ideas from this year’s conferences. We hope you find them useful!
Ann Handley— Digital Marketing & Content Expert
PLAYING IT TOO SAFE
Consumers expect brands to have a voice that matters. Being vanilla and playing it safe is no longer a strategy consumers have much patience for. You will quickly learn that your competitors who present their brand with bold statements, interesting points of view, and thoughtful messaging are winning the race—customers love them for it and these efforts are paying dividends.
YOUR STORY IS THE THING THAT SETS YOU APART
Use your company persona to create and tell a great story. That story doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are some examples of companies who excel at this:
IF THE LABEL FALLS OFF, CAN YOU RECOGNIZE THE BRAND?
Tyler Farnsworth—Managing Director at August United
Grow awareness, improve engagement, and drive your audience to take action. Here's How:
Geoffrey Colon—Sr. Marketing Communications Designer at Microsoft
AIDA = Attention——>Interest——>Decision——>Action
In today’s information-flooded world, the scarcest resource is not ideas or talent, it’s ACTION. How do you get there?
Rethink your group segmentations – swap age and demographics for consumer interests. Instead of marketing your product to, say, millennials, try to reach people who are interested in travel or lifestyle. (Not sure what your customers are interested in? We can help with that.)
Joel Klettke - Conversion Optimization Consultant
When building out effective landing pages, break them down into header, body, and call to action. Consider the following for every page on your website, particularly those where you’re asking people to exchange their information for your content:
In your hero image, focus on why the customer should care, what you’re talking about on the page, and who it’s for. In the body of your page consider how your content will improve their life, why it will work, and why they should trust you. And focus your call to action on what happens next.
Justine Jordan - VP of Marketing, Litmus
**We highly recommend keeping up with Litmus’s blog if your company uses email as a marketing channel.**
Find the right balance between subscriber needs and business needs in email. Switch up your email sends. Don’t just blast out “BUY NOW” messages all the time, instead mix them in with emails that are fun, relevant, and provide value to the customer.
Before you send an email, review Chad S. White’s Hierarchy of Customer Needs. Ensure that your e-mails meet as many of these needs as possible:
Make it easy for customers to both unsubscribe and manage their relationship with you. Remember that there’s no shame in unsubscribes, but you will have a problem if you make it difficult for your prospects and customers to do so, as they’re considerably more likely to mark you as spam in that case.
Purna Virji - Senior Training Manager at Microsoft
The future of search is moving in a more conversational direction.
While not a topic of her discussion, featured snippets in Google is a great example. To see what we’re talking about, try searching for something like “what to wear to a baby shower” and notice the article called out at the top of Google search.
Bing is handling conversational search in a really compelling way, by adding chatbot capability inside of the search engine result page. While it’s only available with a few select restaurants in the Seattle area at the moment, expect this to be coming to more and more searches in the near future. Try this search and click on the Chat button for an example.