Top 10 Things We Love About Our New Website

Back in March, when sports stopped, restaurants closed, and the world paused, we were left with a vacuum of time that, for many of us, was unprecedented. Here at Cubicle Fugitive, much of our day-to-day work slowed or disappeared entirely, allowing us a little bit of time to ponder the question “what do we do now?” After a few moments of self-pity and good amount of soul-searching, we decided it was time to resurrect an oft-shelved project for our most difficult client: ourselves.

Our last website was launched almost seven years ago (ten years ago, if, like me, you think 2020 seems like it’s already been 36 months long). While the site served its purpose for a time, almost immediately after launch we wanted to revamp a lot of its main features including design, functionality and most importantly, content. We tried many times to kickstart a redesign and every time actual client work got in the way. Turns out all we needed was a global pandemic and nothing else to do for a good four months. Whatever the reason, we are all very excited to launch the newest iteration of Cubicle Fugitive’s website, and here are some reasons why it’s the best iteration by far.

1) Righting previous wrongs

I’ll let you in on a little secret: most of our clients are law firms and we specialize in law firm marketing. Want to know what phrase we didn’t use on our last site? Law firm marketing. Yep, it’s true, we didn’t mention the one skill we are most adept at providing, instead choosing to go with the much more generic “professional services marketing”. Of course, we provide marketing services for all types of professions (health care providers, educators, accountants, etc.) but we really should have mentioned law firm marketing since it’s our specialty.

Well, this time we took the advice we dogmatically provide to our clients: we focused on who we are at the core and then strategically demonstrated our points of difference, most notably we made sure the content was streamlined, the UI more focused, and the design more indicative of the quality of work we provide.

2) The work

One of the mandates of building a new site for ourselves was that we really needed to demonstrate the breadth of experience and the level of expertise we have at Cubicle Fugitive. Our new projects showcase and our more fulsome case studies accomplish this and more. We completely revamped all our project images (thanks Designers) and rewrote all the project and case study descriptions (thanks Marketers) and then wrapped it all up in a very visually appealing layout that uses very responsive filtering and deep interlinking (thanks Developers) to ensure all visitors can quickly drill down to exactly what type of project they want to view. The project and case study detail pages are all highlighted by large and vibrant imagery, deep project descriptions and a variety of related content to create visitor engagement.

3) Visual Jazz Hands

Going hand-in-hand with our project showcase is our overall brand refresh that focuses on what we do best: keeping it simple while using design to highlight strategy. While we love good design at Cubicle Fugitive, each decision we make is chosen with a client in mind and our new website greatly demonstrates our love of functional creativity. The new site boasts beautiful design, from richly detailed imagery and large inviting typography, to carefully chosen colours and subtle animations. We’ve added the sizzle where necessary but kept everything clean, well-laid out and most of all, simple to use.

4) Robot-friendly

Look, you may not want to admit it, but the robots are taking over and, we here at Cubicle Fugitive, willfully submit to our new overlords. For this project, we’ve spent an unquantifiable amount of time developing content that is search engine optimized but still reads coherently for the human population. We’ve used terms that make sense for our target markets like law firm marketing, also law firm marketing (see what I did there?) but ensured that all descriptions use natural language and are free of buzzwords and jargon. While we don’t expect every visitor to read the site from top to bottom, we did want to ensure that no matter where you landed, you’d know why you were there, and where you should go next. Most importantly, we wanted both robots and humans alike to know that we are very capable marketers, and also just very friendly in general.

5) No GPS needed

As Cuba Gooding Jr. famously uttered in Jerry Maguire, “Show me the menu.” A hallmark of any of our websites is a very strategically developed site structure that ensures a visitor’s journey is impactful and purposeful. Every professional services website is meant as a sales tool and it’s important to develop a content structure that has your client’s needs in mind. We’re hyper focused on the critical path a user will take, starting with a highly functional full-page menu that keeps the clicks to a minimum and the traffic flowing and ending with strategically placed calls to action to ensure no potential client is left behind. We have a very deep structure with lots of expertise, a varied amount of industries and many projects, but, due to a carefully considered site structure, it is always easy to find what you’re looking for and, sometimes, hopefully, stumble upon something you didn’t even know you wanted to find.

6) One CMS to rule them all

While we work with many different CMSes, we spend most of our time advocating for the enterprise-ready, award-winning solution from Progress called Sitefinity simply because it is the best possible solution for a complex, content-rich website. For this project, we customized the already robust out-of-the-box offerings like super-intuitive content-editing, powerful module-building and advanced features like personalization and multi-site management, to work seamlessly with our requirements: which was to showcase our breadth of services, the beauty of our projects and the expertise of our team. We’ll do a follow up blog about all that our CMS offers but take my word for it, this is the best CMS and, if we’re excited to use it for our own website, we believe you’d be best served to use it for your site as well.

7) All hail the king

We’ve been espousing the importance of content since the middle ages (late 90s). And to this day, content is still king. We strongly believe that the most important factor for both visitor engagement and search engine success is to write words that resonate with viewers and answers questions real and implied. For our site, we started from scratch, rewriting every single piece of content including all our project descriptions, page content and expertise and services. It was a huge undertaking but we strongly believe the end product is both engaging and reflective of what we offer and who we are as a company.

8) Functional Functionality

We love new technology and often get enthralled by shiny new things, but we also pride ourselves on tempering our desire to always push the envelope with a pragmatic approach to using only the technologies that are going to provide added benefits to our clients and their clients. Our website is no different. We completely revamped our functional base, focusing more on front-end technologies while embracing acronyms like MVC, VUE and ICUP. As mentioned above, we fully integrated with our CMS of choice, Progress Sitefinity, and are excitingly exploring some interesting features like personalization, a/b testing, journey mapping and a slew of others.

9) All hands on deck

It’s true that sometimes it takes a village, and in the case of our website, it took several villages, a bunch of zoom calls and countless hours of writing, designing, developing, cropping, re-cropping, editing, bug-testing and cursing to bring this project together. It was truly a team effort that everyone had a hand in producing. It drew on all of our skills including brand and strategy, content marketing and copy-writing, design and advertising, digital marketing and SEO, and web design and development, although it took us almost 7 years to finally finish this project, I think we’d all say that it was well worth the wait.

10) It’s in the details

OK, so I promised you 10 great things about our new website and so far, I’ve only shared 9. Of course, there are many other areas to highlight, and much more to love, but the number 10 reason that I’m excited about this new website is much smaller and subtler in nature. Quite simply, my kids asked me to hide a cat somewhere on the site, and hide it I did, so when you find it (it’s not that hard) make sure to reach out and let us know what you think about cats, our new website and law firm marketing.