Recent work: Industribrand
February 8th, 2009
When looking for work late last year, I recently got in touch with a former employer of mine, Bob Lamons, and we discussed building out a site for his new B2B marketing venture, Industribrand (as in “industry brand”). Now, I’d worked for Bob for nearly six years at his ad agency, Robert Lamons & Associates and when that operation closed its doors, I moved on to publishing for several years. Still, I jumped at the chance to both rebuild a working relationship with Bob as well as flex some more of my skills in web design. As I’m sure often happens in the design industry, I was once again working for a former employer, albeit in a slightly different capacity.
Back in 1998 or so, I’d built the RL&A site (ads2biz.com) entirely by hand, one page at a time. Eventually, I retooled the site using one of the early versions of Movable Type mostly out of a need to make adding and editing content a breeze. Similarly, the Industribrand site would need to be just as easy to use, while still being powerful and flexible. Enter WordPress.
With Movable Type now a commercial product and WordPress a free, open source project with an ever-growing community of developers and supporters, the choice became pretty clear. I’d already spent a fair amount of time using WordPress on other projects that I knew I could make it do things that were beyond the standard “blog” look and feel, and this would be a good opportunity to employ WordPress more as a CMS than a simple blogging tool.
Something that I’ve always been a proponent of when it comes to web design is simple, clean layouts and an uncomplicated experience. While Industribrand would have its own look and feel, that principle would still apply.
One of the holdovers from the original RL&A site would be Bob’s editorial columns as published in Marketing News, but with a new emphasis on marketing principles and ideas, there was no longer a featured portfolio of past work.
Instead, there would be a collection of brand stories that focus on exemplary branding techniques from some of the biggest companies in the world and from Bob Lamons’ own book The Case For B2B Branding, a simple seven-step process to developing and maintaining a strong brand. The challenge this presented is that there wouldn’t be much in the way of visuals or imagery, making the site particularly text-heavy. Ultimately the best solution was to present the site in a simple, very reader-like format. A strong, clean header design, followed by basic navigation links and then a single column of text in the center of the page. Only the archived articles would use a sidebar to allow for a foreword, archive navigation and other tools, like searching, link sharing and finding other related articles.
The advice, wisdom and ideas throughout the site was what visitors should be focused on and providing too many distractions only stood to weaken the message. As a result, the Industribrand site became an exercise in designing around the content, not in lieu of it. The added benefit of having an easy-to-use backend, automated SEO capabilities and flexibility of design was just icing on the cake. Take a look and more importanly, give it a read.
