As you can see, we have a new website! There was nothing wrong with our old website, in fact a lot of folks commented on how great it looked and how well it worked, but we wanted our website to work even better for us.
Believe it or not, rebuilding the Never Settle site has been one of the most challenging projects of 2021. ‘Why?’ you might ask, well in the same way that gardeners can do whatever they like to their garden and decorators can do what they like to their homes, using our own web design services means we can do whatever we like. We effectively become our own client.
The great thing about building your own website is you can change it as much as you like. The worst thing about building your own website is you can change it as much as you like.
As you can imagine, having an open brief and full reign over what we do gets our designers very excited, but that can make things trickier as there simply aren’t the boundaries we’re used to when working on client projects.
But it’s not just about the website, we also overhauled our SEO, we took the time to tweak our branding and we went really deep with our UI and UX design to make sure our new site lasts.
So rather than bragging about how amazing our website is and all the awards we’ve won for it, instead we’ve decided to share with you the reasons behind building a new website, how we did it and the thought process along the way.
If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
With so much admiration for the old Never Settle website, why even bother to build something new from scratch?
Two reasons; one is so our website will work better for us and the second is so that it will continue to work for us in the future.
The web is always evolving and digital marketing evolves with it, and so to ensure we’re ahead of the curve and up to date with the latest and greatest, we needed a new platform to make this happen.
To be completely transparent, our website isn’t technically finished and it probably never will be! There’s a saying in the world of web design…
A website is like a painting where the paint never dries; it’s never really finished.
And our website’s ‘paint’ is still dripping wet; we’ve already got plans for tweaks and refinements and the site will continue to evolve throughout 2022 and beyond.
From WordPress to Webflow
At Never Settle, we’re experts in both WordPress web design as well as Webflow web design. Both are exceptional platforms and both offer everything our clients could need for different use cases.
If you want to dive in deeper between the two platforms, our Webflow Vs WordPress blog is well worth a read.
So why the switch? WordPress is incredibly diverse and being open source means you own 100% of all the source code. It’s one of the most popular content management systems out there and has been for some time, however our needs have recently changed.
Webflow is much more design focused and is great for building beautiful sites that don’t require advanced functionality. The old Never Settle website worked as both our agency site but also a place for folks to find out about our own in-house products such as WP Cloner. It was doing a lot of jobs.
We’ve pivoted so that the Never Settle agency site is now 100% focused on Never Settle and we’ve moved our products out onto their own individual websites.
This not only keeps things neat and tidy but makes for a better user experience. Those who want our design and marketing services come to Never Settle and those who want our various apps and plugins go to the relevant sites.
Giving power to the marketing team
To keep moving with the evolution of the web, we wanted to give our marketing team more control over the website to allow them to do what they needed to do.
Our old site gave them plenty of control over the content, but anything design or functionality related meant they would need to get the help of one of our developers.
Making the switch to Webflow means our marketing team can update the content, the look and feel of the website and the functionality independently. This means changes can be made quicker and reduces the number of team members needed to make these changes.
The job of our website is to communicate who we are at Never Settle, what we can offer and to give value by sharing our knowledge for free. With the new Never Settle website, this is exactly what the marketing team are able to do.
Custom built everything
We don’t use templates, like ever! We believe since every business is unique every website should be as well, and so we design and build everything from scratch.
The result is a website that looks better, stands out from the competition and can be made to the exact specifications of our clients.
With our own website, we wanted to push the boundaries and see how far we can push Webflow without detracting from the user experience.
While we’ve used the building blocks included within Webflow, everything you see has been custom build from scratch. From the navigation to the graphics, we let our designers loose to come up with something that matches our brand.
Refining our branding as we go
Speaking of brand, we’ve had a little makeover here as well. Nothing drastic, but a little refinement goes a long way.
We’ve kept our main brand identity exactly the same, we’ve simply tweaked the colors and fonts that we use. Our gold color is gone and instead replaced with a vibrant yellow that contrasts nicely with our use of black and white.
To compliment the yellow, we’ve also given ourselves two new secondary colours in the shades of purple and turquoise. The idea being these ultra-vibrant colours will help highlight what’s important to our users.
We’ve also gone with a new font called ‘Jost’. It’s a very clean, very versatile sans serif font that works really well as both a heading and body text.
Tweaking your branding when building a new website makes a lot of sense as it’s the perfect opportunity to have a light refresh.
Since your website is your main marketing hub to which all other marketing efforts point to, it’s vital to ensure your website looks and works how your users would expect.
So if you’re website isn’t up to scratch and you’ve never been too sure of that font choice six years ago, a tweak and change while you’re at it could be worth while.
Want to make 2022 the year you get your website down? Get in touch! We’d love to learn about what you’re looking to achieve and advise how we can help.
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