The Ups & Downs Of Building Your Own Digital Marketing Agency Website

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If you didn’t already know, we launched our new digital marketing company’s website on August 26th. It’s been in the works since January of this year and with other digital marketing client projects and then the pandemic hitting, it took a bit of a backseat for a while. All in all, it’s beautiful and we’re very proud of the finished product.

I just got off a video call where we were conducting our internal retrospective meeting where we discussed how the website development project went. It got me thinking about the ups and downs of building your digital marketing agency’s own website and I’ve laid them out here: 

1. Prioritizing yourself as a digital marketing client

As are many digital marketing agencies, we are typically the painter that doesn’t paint its own house. This website was a big step in reversing that mentality. In June 2019, we refreshed our brand and essentially updated the existing site with the new branding. It was passable, and I was surprised by how many people would say they loved our website.

When we started this website development project back in January it had been a long time coming. Years ago, the team designed the website in-house but we had to outsource the development portion due to our resources being tied up with client projects at the time. It deeply pained us all to not develop our own website, but we weighed the pros and cons and decided to move forward. Three years later, we were finally ready to redesign and develop a brand new website with our own team and to the level that we knew we needed to represent our skill set and work.

2. Holding yourself accountable

I’m proud to say that GCommerce builds beautiful sites that perform for our digital marketing clients. To be honest though, many website design firms are capable of building beautiful websites. What sets us apart from them is our website development process which is focused on the client’s overall business strategy. So when you are acting as both the client and the primary decision maker internally, lines can get blurred. In my role, it’s easy to get off track, not follow process and ultimately cause unnecessary confusion and frustration amongst the team. I frequently found myself pausing before firing off an email with feedback and I know I let at least a couple of them go out. But, I would quickly remember what that does to the overall website development project and why it’s so important to keep communication organized.

3. Empowering the entire team

One of the biggest “ups” of building your own company’s website, is if managed correctly, the entire team has ownership of it. Because we aren’t limited by budget or even time, each team member can participate in all of the conversations so they know the ultimate goal of each decision. And not only do they know what the end goal is, they help create it. Our digital marketing agency’s new website is by far the best one we’ve had yet and it’s because we were able to have an entire team meaningfully contribute.

The last 6 months have challenged us all in ways we couldn’t have expected. Building a new website for ourselves was a luxury that we were very fortunate to be able to afford. The team’s heart and soul was poured into this website development project and it shows. We are all in love with this refreshed representation of our work and who we are. Hope you enjoy it.

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