About this time last year, we decided it was high time to re-design and overhaul the antiquated SMC website. We knew we wanted to build a site that, in my colleague Deirdre’s words, “takes advantage of the most current advances in web design and coding, highlights our images in a way the previous one hadn’t, has an overall cleaner look than before, capitalizes on the graphic design & brand work we’ve been doing recently, edits and updates all the text from the old site, and can be easily updated and modified ourselves.”
We got it, I think. Someone once said that getting information from the internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant; hopefully this site will be less like that than our previous one.
After searching awhile, we decided to work with Barrel who have been great: patient, consistent and willing to stretch. Deirdre and I (and our partner Ryan) visited them once, for a meeting in their office in New York City. Quite an experience. There were 15-20 people staring at their screens working intensely. I doubt that any of them are older than my 28-year-old daughter.
There were big plates of delicious Korean food left over from lunch that we had to sample before we left.
In addition, Carol Kolodny, who does our graphic design work and Deirdre’s brother MacDara (who works in digital media in NYC) have been involved since the beginning. As we’ve been working we’ve also reviewed progress with and incorporated feedback from the SMC Marketing Group and Management Committee.
But mostly it has been Deirdre, who has tirelessly and relentlessly organized and coordinated the whole effort, and conducted the relationships with the various parties. I’ve been writing, helping her with design and image choices, and collaborating with her about final decisions. We both got caught up with an overwhelmingly large and fast-paced renovation job this spring, and therefore laid the website down for a while, but we’re been back at it now and it’s Ready to Launch!!
Hope you enjoy it. This is just the beginning. The site will be updated continuously and we already have a long list of changes we want to make. Tell us what you like. And tell us what you would change; we’ll add it to the list.
Deirdre will be in charge of updating and managing the site. My commitment with this launch is to make this blog more regular (at least one post every two weeks), and to expand it by featuring other SMC voices besides mine from time to time.
Leave a Reply