Back to all articles We finally made it! We relaunched snipclip.com. I will not let you know when we started talking about the new website. It’s just too long ago that we realized that we need something new. The content of the old website was still ok, but it was not „state of the art“. As a digital agency, we need a website that is state of the art, of course. Though we are not able to use our website to process business transactions – like many of our clients do – it is our poster child. It will let you know what to expect from us – a well thought-thru usability, a professional design and a smooth browsing experience.
As for every other project we reflect on what we can improve after we have finished it. Guess – we had more learnings than usual. Here they are.
Quality vs. deadline
We did not want to have a website that looks too similar to any of those templates widely used. Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for anyone else, those templates usually are very well done. So, we had to create something different that was not different for the sake of being different. It took some time to develop an individual UI by iterating again and again. We did not stop iterating when our coming soon page went online, though the pressure to relaunch grew after we „lost“ our actual website and replaced it by an interim page. But it helped speed up. Of course, you can also set a specific date, an internal or external event when the page has to be ready. Without anything pushing us, we would probably still be iterating. Learning no. 1 – a project is a project, i.e., it has a start date and an end date (of course, we knew this before).
On and off
We had many interruptions during our website project. Clients‘ projects needed all available resources, so that we paused our own project altogether. It’s always hard to restart something which had been put aside. You feel like you are wasting time to get into it again. You forget things and find them out again when trying out something. And then you remember … sounds familiar? There is no difference between internal projects and external projects in this respect. Starting again usually is no fun. So, when we felt like it is REALLY time to relaunch, we did not pause anymore. We did not allow other projects to eat up all resources. And of course, it helped getting things done. Learning no. 2 – don’t press pause before MVP1 is out of the door (of course, we recommend this to our clients all the time).
Eat your own dog food
We are always happy to hear from our clients when they are happy with us. We react quickly, do changes, deliver estimations, create rough concepts they can present to their clients, develop products … We focus on our clients‘ needs, listen to them. We treat their projects way better then we treat our own projects. When somebody tells us that he wants his product being taken as serious as our own product, we keep silent. Nobody wants us to do that. It’s the other way round. If we followed the recommendations, we have for our clients it would have worked way better. We would have started with a timing, a roadmap and would have discussed with the client, if there were any sufficient reasons for a delay. We would not have pressed the pause button. Learning no. 3 – use your project management skills in your own projects, not just your UI/UX and development skills.
We already have plans for another website. We will let you know what our learnings were again. Until then – have fun exploring our page and feedback is always welcome 🙂