January, 2022.
The team were all back in the office after a well-deserved Christmas break, huddled around an iMac discussing the design of our new website, up on display on the screen in front of us.
We’d been working with an agency for the previous year or so which had been a challenge, to say the least. Illness, indecision, and various other delays had dragged the project on for longer than we wanted and, to make matters worse, the agency had announced they were going out of business.
Both the design and marketing teams were reviewing the site with fresh eyes in the hope of soon being ready to launch, and one by one were airing our thoughts.
“It’s not as good as the current site.” said Yameng, newest member of the team “In fact, I think it looks… pretty bad.”
“When I applied for the job here, I really liked the website. I thought it looked like a cool company to work for.” She went on, “But this new design, it’s kinda boring”.
In a quick minute, she’d summarised what we’d all been secretly thinking but didn’t want to admit: The new site wasn’t good enough. We’d have to go back to the drawing board.
Shitbags.
Why even build a new site in the first place?
Back in 2018, we launched our “Piknik” service – a do-it-yourself version of our main offering. It was an experiment at first, so we took the decision to build it as a separate site using Shopify. That was a good idea. It made it quick and easy to set up and edit, which is particularly useful when you’re not quite sure who your audience is and you might need to change things around again and again.
While we were experimenting with that, in 2019 we rebranded from Team Cooper to Peek & Poke. This was also a good idea, for reasons I’ve previously explained . In doing that we launched a new Peek & Poke website that was mobile-friendly (The old Team Cooper one wasn’t) and easier to add content to.
However, by the time we got to the tail end of 2020, we realised that having two separate websites that were (kinda) doing the same job for (it turns out) the same audience, wasn’t such a good idea. While our Piknik experiment had proven itself, we realised it would be better positioned as part of our Peek & Poke brand than as a separate entity. This would help streamline our marketing activity, simplify our sales processes and make it clearer to customers that Piknik and Peek & Poke were, in fact, the same business.
And so, we thought, we’d simply combine the two websites into one! Part B2B ecommerce site, part portfolio. An all-in-one sales and marketing asset for our business. How hard could that be?
Let’s build a website!
Creative projects are hard. They always take longer than expected. So when the agency we were working with told us it would take about three months to get our new site completed, I secretly figured it would be more like six. But that was OK, so long as it went live before June, we’d have everything ready in time for the Christmas rush. Ho, ho, ho!
“Why aren’t you designing it in-house?”, my wife Em had asked me. “You’re very particular about these sorts of things. It is quite important you get it right, right ?”
Right. It was quite important. Our websites were our main sales and marketing tools and as well as figuring out how to combine them both into one, we needed to make absolutely sure we weren’t shooting ourselves in the foot in the process.
The problem with doing it ourselves however was that we had game projects to be getting on with and, to state the obvious, we aren’t web designers. We wanted an external agency to make it easy for us, guide us through the process, keep us on track, and nicely tell us “no” when we come up with bad ideas. Just like we would with our clients.
It’s not you, it’s me
As I’ve already alluded to, things didn’t go too well. In hindsight, the root of the problem was we were all very keen to get the project done . So much so, that a few of us let things progress, despite having the nagging feeling that things weren’t quite right. We were trying to stay relatively hands-off in the interests of getting it out the door. Sometimes you have to have faith that things will work out in the end – you have to trust the soup.
The June deadline came and went. I don’t think we’d been the easiest of clients and the agency had had a tough time in the aftermath of COVID due to staff illness. As we were reaching the end of the project, they told us that for various reasons they were going to cease trading at the end of the year, so we’d have to get everything wrapped up by then. It had been a tough project for everyone involved.
When we were back in the office on that January morning, I remember hoping that we weren’t far off launching. When I think back about it now, perhaps we could have? But in the wake of Yameng’s epic truth-bomb, it just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like it was ticking the boxes we needed it to. We weren’t confident it was going to do the job it needed to do.
Let’s build a website, again!
It was a hard decision, but we resolved to get back on the horse and try again. Looking back now, it was the right move, but it felt pretty damn painful at the time.
This time around, we decided to take the lead in the design of the look and feel to avoid getting stuck in the same hole again. Although we weren’t completely starting from scratch (we re-used as much as we could), we were having to work on the site around our game projects and so it took even longer than before.
We were introduced to a new agency, Pixel Kicks , who were tasked with translating our designs into a usable state, then re-building the site around them, filling the holes left from the version before. They did a great job, have been very patient and very flexible, something I am very grateful for.
18 months later, we finally put the new site live.
“It looks like the old one to me”, Em said with a cheeky grin when I proudly showed her the final result. “There’s a lot more to it than that one page!” I retorted.
Her comment reminded me that we’d put so much thought and effort into something that most visitors will only see a small slice of. Was it actually worth it?
Only two years lateI was speaking with another business owner a little while ago about the journey we’d been on and the amount of time it had taken. “Oh, is that all!?” He said, “It took us four years to get our website live, and still everyone bloody moans about it. Sounds like you did alright.”
And actually, now it’s done, I think he’s right. We’ve talked at length in the office about feeling like we needed to go through the process of building it twice so that we could understand what we really wanted. In some ways it’s similar to the approach we take with building our games – We make an initial version, test it out, and if it doesn’t work, we go back, refine it and try again. Loads of effort (and the occasional argument) goes into our games behind the scenes to make the user experience as seamless as possible. This website project was no different.
Two and a half years after starting the project, I’m extremely pleased to say we’ve got the site we wanted! It did all work out in the end.
I’ve always had a saying around the office that “We don’t do websites! ”, but in writing this post it occurred to me that we’ve effectively built one a year for the past four years. I’d love to tell you now that we won’t be building any more for a while, but that’s not true either. We’re about to start work on another experimental project and that’ll need one too!
But that’s a story for a future blog post.
