A fresh (digital) home for Ditto
After many months of agonising over the nuances of design, language, tonality and form, I'm delighted to share our brand new website.
The chance to create a fresh website is more than creating pixels on a screen - it presents a far larger opportunity to reimagine our identity, ambition and the core messaging which underlines all that we do.
Over the past year we have spent untold hours considering who we are as a creative collective. Our new website is the result of conversations with clients and friends; late night thoughts and early morning inspiration. We hope you'll enjoy the experience of browsing it as much as we've enjoyed labouring over the details - and the tiny bursts of magic you'll encounter along the way.
I'd love to share with you some insights gained from this process, which I hope might help you, should you be planning a fresh website or identity for your business, too.
“Your site… it’s so warm, meaningful and good for the soul! Well done. As always, unparalleled quality.”
Why now?
There wasn’t actually anything wrong with our old site. It worked perfectly well and was still pulling its weight as a marketing tool – in fact, the day we switched it off, we received a new enquiry through it. And yet, it had been a niggling concern for a while that it no longer showed off our work, or our business, to its best advantage… and if we’re not successfully showcasing our value and expertise, it becomes that little bit harder to be perceived as we would like to be. We have committed to working towards fewer higher end projects over 2024, and knew that to achieve that, the website simply had to work harder.
The goal
When you embark upon a rebrand, a website design or marketing campaign for your business, it has to be underlined with a clear commercial purpose in order to bring focus and ensure that all of the effort you put in is rewarded. We wanted to achieve a well-optimised website which reflected the higher end nature of our work, leading clients through a thoughtful journey that nudged them towards getting in touch. Cue an exercise in mapping out the user experience, which resulted in a series of deeply unsexy but highly useful flow charts, which guided the content we needed for each page of the site.
How we began
Having completed our rebrand in 2023, we had laid strong foundations having devoted hours of thought and discussion to our strengths, our ambition, the value that we bring and the aspects of our business which not only make us unique, but that clients really love us for. With this thinking done, we could evaluate the elements of our current site that should remain, and what we needed to change. My mind works best when I can think and write freely, so I began by writing pages of content which contained everything I wanted to express to clients through out site. I knew that only a small fraction of the words I wrote would make it to the site but that didn’t matter… at this stage, it was all about thinking at a high level.
Bringing it together
New photography was an absolute must for our new site. I still loved our previous images, but they were taken six, maybe even seven years ago and they didn’t look much like us any more! When they were taken, I wanted to achieve a super friendly, happy vibe which the photos did perfectly – but now we are embracing the depth of our experience and wanted images that reflected the thoughtful, refined direction of our business. This is a really key example of thinking strategically and being willing to let go of details which you may love but are no longer right. We waited until Autumn to have our good friend Michael Jackson come to take some photos, as the tones and textures of the season fit the Ditto brand perfectly.
The challenges
It’s incredibly difficult to pinpoint what it is that makes your business unique, much less find a way to articulate it that is not only effective, but that sits comfortably with your ego. I found it immensely helpful to seek the counsel of trusted friends and clients - those who’ve worked with us and know our business arguably better than we do. Whilst it can feel uncomfortable to ask for their unedited feedback on your work and the value they experienced as a result of working with you, it provides such invaluable context and a perspective that I truly believe is impossible to arrive at alone.
How to get it right
Having a clear goal, clarity around your message and knowing the impact you’d like to make helps enormously when it comes to evaluating what you’ve created and knowing whether it actually fits the brief. It can be difficult to detach personal preferences from what is ‘right’ for the project, but trying to look at it as objectively as possible and removing the emotion helps you to assess things constructively while avoiding getting hung up on the details which you may love, but don’t actually help to deliver upon the strategic objective.
“I love your new website. Its beautiful and feels like a lovely balance between still being boutique and bespoke but with a really healthy body of work behind you and a degree of confidence and maturity which suits you guys so well.”
The results
I’m delighted with the outcome. The site has been live just long enough to send it around to some of our business friends, who’ve provided amazing feedback that reassures us we have arrived at a result that shows off the best of our work in a way which underlines our ethos and personality as a creative collective.
Above all, I feel proud of our site - it lends confidence to us, and will infuse prospective clients with the confidence they need to place their project with us, too. Will it evolve over the coming months? Definitely. But I know that proper thought has been devoted to every last word, detail and function… and that alone will take us far. I do hope you enjoy our site as much as we have enjoyed creating it.
