When is a website finished? This is more than an academic question, as organizations have to constantly wrestle with the conflicting realities of limited available resources to devote to creating (or recreating) their online properties versus a website’s ability to be a “living document” with content updated on a daily or even minute-by-minute basis.

Every day, new prospective customers visit your organization’s website. Your website may also serve many other constituents – existing employees, prospective employees, investors, media, researchers – but its primary function is (or should be) to serve as a 24/7 communications hub at the very center of your overall digital marketing and sales strategy. What message is it providing to those prospective clients about your organization’s mission, values and capabilities? Does it offer value to those visitors and provide opportunities for further engagement? Is it easy to navigate and does it encourage return visits for additional “bites” of content during the buyer’s journey? If the answer is no to any of those questions, it’s time to look at renovating your online presence.

It’s often been said about marketing agencies that “the shoemaker’s children have no shoes,” and that was an accurate description of our organization as well. The Quell Group has created dozens of client websites, but replacing our own aging Quell website was outweighed by other daily demands. Everyone viewed it as strategically important, but never quite urgent enough to prioritize ahead of client work. But, like a house that had once served its purpose well but had been remodeled and added on to, the Quell website no longer flowed well or met the needs of its current owners – so we decided a change was overdue.

Today, we launched the new version of the Quell website. Because 60% of our visitors arrive via mobile devices, we made sure that the website was fully responsive and mobile-friendly. We updated our blog content and other thought leadership content. We utilized a single navigation structure and a consistent look and feel across the different parts of the site. We now have one format for all client work, while keeping the client case studies relevant to each of our practice areas (Branding, Public Relations and Digital Marketing). And we have more opportunities for user engagement with consistent links to our social channels and landing pages and forms powered by our own QMAP (Quell’s Marketing Automation Platform) system.

We are now eating our own dog food and drinking our own Kool-Aid (pick your preferred metaphor). All of this work was designed to create a better online experience for our existing and prospective customers, and provide a positive example of the digital work we can do for our clients. Please let us know your thoughts by dropping us a note.