The result: an all-new altosagency.com, designed for the future and drawing on some of the best knowledge we bring to the table. Because why shouldn’t our own site look as great as the sites we build for our partners?

Practicing What We Preach

For any agency, keeping the focus on clients and partners takes precedent approximately, oh, 10,000 percent of the time, right? Spending time and effort updating your own online presence can be tough - and, all too often, agencies let their own websites slip into obsolescence, even as the work they produce for clients becomes better and better over the years.

We decided that the only way to keep Altos from that same fate was to take bold, decisive action to keep our site up-to-date and future-proofed for the years ahead.

That’s why (although it took a serious amount of project management work) we dedicated resources to treating ourselves like a client; because, at the end of the day, we are one of our clients, and the only way we can succeed is if we treat our site with the respect it deserves.

Thus, the great Altos Website update of 2018 began, and the result - the work we put into our new site - speaks for itself.

Jumping Forward, & Bringing It All Back Home

When we started concepting our new website, we decided to rely on the same proven strategies that have worked so well for our partners:

1. Keep navigation simple, straightforward, and self-evident, especially on mobile

Our design team, working on a custom Joomla template, designed the new site with ease of navigation in mind, and that meant rethinking where content would live on the site and how quickly or easily a user would encounter it.

For instance, we placed some our finest Work Pages right on the front page, helping users see exactly what it is we do and which work we particularly stand behind before getting into the finer details.

We’ve always said the quality of our work should speak for itself, and this helps it do just that.

2. Audit and consolidate content into related categories, driven by SEO considerations

Fifteen years of business and several website iterations later, and we’d accrued quite a bit of content - some of it still plenty good and relevant, and some of it either well dated or in need of some serious refreshing.

While we were certain that a good chunk of it could be left behind, we still wanted to preserve a decent amount for the new site.

That meant combing through, selecting the right content to carry over based on search and SEO goals, and updating as we saw fit.

Then, based on a new category structure for both our Services Pages and our Blog, we consolidated, updated, and implemented all of the content for the new site based on best practices, with meta information, visual layout, and graphic considerations all kept top-of-mind.

3. Maintain consistent brand voice, color scheme, and visual layout

We talk all the time about how brand strength is derived through a solid, cohesive content strategy.

In putting that to work on our new site, we focused on three major avenues: brand voice (throughout all of our site copy, blogs, social posts, and emails), color scheme (to match our existing branded visuals), and overall layout (to play up our strengths as forward-thinking innovators in website design).

Brand Voice: It’s All in How You Make It Sound

We want our “voice” - the overall omniscient narrator to the Altos story - to be a few things, and to not be a few things.

• To be: clear, concise, informative, sometimes funny, a bit cheeky, and overall engaging.
• To not be: boring, preachy, annoying, show-offy, salesy.

Color Scheme: Gotta Love That Altos Green

From the early days of Altos, we’ve claimed a few colors as our own: black, white, grey, and the (seemingly) omnipresent green that decorates our office walls.

If you don’t have time to stop by and check it out, take a look at the site - you’ll see it in our links, in various graphic elements, and along our CTAs.

Graphic Layout: Fullscreen Ready, Mobile Responsive

We love fullscreen graphics, and that’s why we formatted many of our standard blog, Work Page, and Service Page graphics to stretch from left to right on desktop and mobile alike.

Not only does this make inspecting our graphic work easier, but it helps keep everything in line as content scales down for navigation on a range of devices.

4. Make exploration fresh and fun, with stimulating animations to keep users reading from page to page

Adding animations to a website is a subtle art - too many, and you have something straight out of the late 90s; too few and your users might just wonder why you bothered to put any in at all. Picking the right mix of animations, and the right application, takes an eye for UX.

With subtle swoop-in headers and elevating copy blocks activated by scroll, our site offers that playful balance to engage and keep a reader moving down the page no matter where their journey might take them.

All Together Now

We spent a long time planning, designing, concepting, auditing, writing, and getting ready for the new site to launch, all directed toward the goal of bringing in more traffic, reaching more business, and making it easier for visitors to get a sense of who we are, what we do, and why we do it.

From the updated Team pages meant to highlight the people who make Altos tick to the consolidated and focused Work and Blog pages designed to bring new users to the site, the new Altos website looks a lot like something we’d be more than happy to provide to a client. And since we’re the client, we’re pretty pleased with the result.

Have thoughts on our new site? Get in touch and let us know what you think - we’re all ears.

• Conor Snell
• Social Media & Content Strategist
• conor@altosagency.com