Well here we are, just about 3 years from the day someone on the Westlake Design team said "Our website sucks.". I might be exaggerating the time a little, but I'm not that far off. It's been a really long road and we've finally arrived at something we feel represents who we are today. A great deal of our struggle to launch a new site has been my fault - my inability to define on paper who we are. Why's it so tough?
I think it's the whole design and development thing. Or maybe I should say design OR development. You see, for years everyones been telling me we can't be both. There's no way we can be a design studio and a development shop. Everyone thinks if we're a design shop we must be an ad agency and everything that entails. People think we must be a development shop to have the technical chops we do now. I even had a very close friend a few weeks ago tell me that we should lose the design in our company name because it was confusing. He told me he felt we're just a web shop and that he thought he hurt my feelings for telling me so. And thats when it really hit me - design is really the most important thing about us (and arguably the most valuable).
These are the things that set us apart from say - a great offshore development shop. We're great designers. Maybe not in an ad agency way - and I think thats a good thing. I think we're great designers in a better way - in a way that creates awesome results for our clients. We apply great design to everything we touch. Great design means better results - websites that are more usable, brands that have more impact, software that takes less time to develop. In a way, I would argue that design is really the true value we bring to our clients, and we built our new website with the hope of conveying that.
I've always heard people say doing your own work is the hardest thing you'll ever do. Nah, it only took us 3 years.
