New Website for Me

It is time to update the Draper DNA website again. This time we I chose to be the designer of the site built from a vision I had created in my mind. This article is about how the vision occurs and the path to bringing it to life at DraperDNA.com.

It Happens Every Three Years

 

Ten years ago, I left my partnership with a traditional agency to build my vision of an agency dedicated solely to the home and building industry. A competitive review of the agency landscape found agencies defining and describing themselves by their skills sets. They were PR agencies or digital agencies or creative agencies. We tried this jacket on promoting our integration of services to make it easier to work with us versus multiple agencies. We built our first website with integration as the theme plus a parallel to Mad Men and Don Draper. It was a good conversation starter, and it was fun. After three years of reflecting on the marketplace, I knew it was time for a change.

Being True to Ourselves

 

Being the true to myself, I decided Draper DNA would showcase our connections with the prospective clients and their customers based on the fact we, too, were marketers from manufacturers. I would often say “I have walked in your shoes” as a director or vice president of marketing and this makes us uniquely qualified. It resonated with clients, so we showcase ourselves in our second website this way. Three years passed and now the other agencies in the landscape began mirroring our approach. Time to change.

Disrupt. Surprise. Delight.

 

When you look in the mirror, you see the competition and yourself. You have a choice as to what you wish to focus on. I decided to focus on what I do well – disrupt, surprise, and delight. We built a new website feature our green apple orange and promoting our ability to disrupt the status quo to achieve exceptional results. It was a unique approach in the conservative home and building industry that inspired exciting opportunities and remarkable results for the clients that chose to discover what this meant for them. Once again, other agencies began talking about disrupting and challenging as their approach to business. Time to change.

Experience Applied

 

Changing your website every three years is likely unusual and possibly unnecessary. The Disrupt website was performing well under standard measures. The idea of changing the website is more a reflection of my need to follow my vision of where agencies should go next. More specifically, where Draper DNA should go next AND stand alone for the next three years or more.

I had a vision for what is next for Draper DNA. I contemplated making the change to the website for a year asking myself is this necessary for the website and, just as importantly, for me and the business. The answer was YES. It was and is time to share with you what the newest version of Draper DNA looks like. We are a highly skilled and experience group of the very best people across disciplines. There are few as experienced as we are. There are even less that have this experience to apply their skills and knowledge to your business and building products marketing. Our experience applied is the foundation of our business, the services we provide, and the website to have launched.

People First

 

The new website lead with our strength – the incredible and highly experienced people of Draper DNA. We present our people first as you arrive on the home page in black and white. The color choice is unique to the industry and reflects our approach to business – we are black and white with a dash of color in just the right places.

Move the cursor over each one and client on them as they are highlighted in blue. Click on the highlighted person and you visit their Bio page to see and hear them tell you a story of how their experience applied is unique and meaningful to your business.

Our Experience

 

The new Draper DNA website uses a similar approach to highlight the services we provide through highlights to actual projects completed for our clients. Are you interested in learning about our creative services? See examples of a project featuring our artwork and another showcasing our copywriting. The same is true for social media, public relations, branding, research, website creation, video, and 3D experiences. The blue highlights are found when sharing insights through our blog and our Instagram posts.

The Test of Time

 

The new Draper DNA is built to stand the test of time. We know change blows across the land like the sand in the desert. We embrace this change and believe we foster and create significant changes ourselves. This new website is both a functional tool for our business but also a metaphor for how we think, act, foster change, and react to it. As a result, we believe we are built to stand the test of time.

Personal Note

 

The new Draper DNA website was inspired, in part, by the website created by my daughter for her business Abby Leigh Studio. The site is both beautiful and highly functional. The choice of colors, typeface, layout and navigation, content, photography, and video production were all created from my vision for this site. I was able to be the project manager for the construction of the site, the photos, and video were the work of the team.

We experimented with remote photography and video capture across multiple states and locations. This saved us time and money and created a new set of services to offer our clients. We used a little AI for image manipulation.

Thank you to Paulo, our video master, and Caleb, our lead photographer. The greatest thanks go to Chad the master builder of the site.

I, personally, learned a lot about the process of building a website which will translate for the next client website project. It also gave me the opportunity to reflect on the business, define what is next for us, and get excited to make it happen. I invite you to do the same type of thinking for your website and business. Let me know if we can help.