13 Days to build a new website. Is that even possible? (Yes)

I started my new role with Orange Logic on November 21st as the Sr. Digital Marketing Manager and on Friday December 9, 2016 we launched a brand new website! I personally feel it was a great accomplishment for a 16-year-old startup to accomplish and I thought it would be worth sharing just how and why we did it.

For more than 16 years Orange Logic has been acting as a research company, with one primary goal; to build the most robust, versatile, and elegant SaaS Digital Asset Management platform in the world. During this time, we've seen steady growth entirely by referrals/word-of-mouth, and for a business generating great referrals and building lasting relationships with it's customers a new website wasn't always the highest priority.

So, you're probably thinking, "why build a new website if you've got great customers and get great referrals?" The answer: we feel it's time the world knew about our product and why we're a leader! So without further adieu, I would like to introduce Orange Logic's new website, featuring CORTEX | DAM.

FYI - We are hiring! So if you're interested or know someone looking for a new career please share this: www.orangelogic.com/careers

How did we build it so quickly?

In the sections below here's what to expect (so you can scroll to the section you're most interested in):

1. I'll show you the new pages we built + why we built those specific pages
2. I'll discuss the platform we chose to build the new website
3. I'll share the template we used to model our website design (and why that was so helpful)
4. I share how a few resources is all you need to get a website up quickly
5. I share a view on web design and the approach we took for the launch.

As anyone who's built a new website would know, it's a often very time consuming and a bit challenging to say the least. In fact, a quick Google search for "average time it takes to build a new website" will result in the following:

If you want to build a website in less than 12 weeks you'll need to be willing to make a some adjustments to your expectations and have a completely different approach to the website rebuild in general. We focused on 5 key objectives to launch our website quickly:

1. Pick the most important pages for launch and only build those

We have an entire web tree that is filled with a ton of pages we would like to have one day. During our planning phase, we recognized launching with all that content isn't efficient, so we pared down our pages to the six most important pages for our customers and prospects:

1. Home Page - Everyone needs their destination page, so this was an obvious choice ;)

2. Digital Asset Management (our core product page) - this is a strategic page meant to showcase our strength in the DAM marketplace. It'll be a great anchor for our SEO strategy moving forward as well.

3. Customer Examples - We felt showcasing our amazing customers and the work we have done with them was an important factor for our brand. This may not be a part of your strategy, but for us it's one of our biggest strengths.

4. Contact - What company doesn't want to be contacted by their customers and prospects? Not us! We built an easy-to-use contact form on our new page, along with all of our office locations and phone numbers.

5. About - We've got a great story to tell and our founding is unique so we felt that it was important to launch our new website and share some of that information with our current and potential customers. We'll add more to this page over time.

6. Demo - Every company needs a CTA to drive new business. At Orange Logic (much like many B2B SaaS companies) we offer Product Demonstrations / Tours. For this, we'll built an initial splash page focused on some core messaging and we'll continue testing the layout / design / content over time.

2. Choose the right platform

The web is filled with a ton of options for building new websites these days. I don't really want to attempt listing anything here, but if you're interested in seeing a comprehensive list of website building platforms, just click here. Fortunately for me, before I started my new position we had already begun the contract negotiations with HubSpot and with my history of working within their solution and their powerful HubSpot COS I knew that we could build a website quickly.

The HubSpot COS is packed with a ton of useful features, including website staging, domain mapping and management, and way more. The simplicity of the HubSpot COS eliminates the need for any advanced IT work (though I do recommend having someone with experience work with you to make sure things are properly set up. There really isn't any other solution that packs in website hosting, landing page, blog, and email marketing into one elegant and efficient platform.

3. Buy a template to get you off the ground quickly

There are plenty of perks to using HubSpot COS (such as mobile ready pages out of the box).

One of my favorite perks about leveraging the HubSpot platform is the availability of beautiful templates — both free and paid —for multiple types of content you'll be building within HubSpot. Just pop over to the HubSpot Marketplace and take a look around. You'll find lots of inspiration and if you're willing to spend a little cash (and I do mean a little) you can get a LOT of value.

We ended up purchasing a template pack called the "Exquisite Pack" which for the value was hands down the best. For less than $1,000.00 we got 58 Website Page Templates, 9 Landing Pages, 3 Email Templates, 6 System Page Templates, and 2 Blog Templates.

But, if you take a look at our new website compared to the template you'll notice it looks nothing like the original design. That's because the real value of the template we purchased came in the excellent CSS file that was included with the purchase. Which brings me to my next point, you'll want to have the right resources to get your website up quickly.

4. Have the right resources (Copy, Design, Develop)

The platform we selected allowed us to be really flexible. You don't have to be an expert web dev to launch a website on the HubSpot COS, but you do need someone with the skills to tweak the templates and write a bit of CSS. Early on in my career I taught myself a bit of the essential front-end development skills and was capable of getting the website to it's current state.

Development isn't the only thing you'll need though, get the right resources for Copy and Design to help you tighten everything up before launch too. I would highly recommend using a simple scope of work to keep our resources focused on the most important topics too. I was lucky enough to have some very talented contractor's in my network so we used a designer and a copy editor to help me spruce up a few things here and there.

P.S. It might be worth using a project management solution to get your website off the ground too. Luckily HubSpot has one that I used :)

5. Don't be too picky about graphics / visual design right away

For your project, make some of the same compromises we did. Don't spend hours and tons of cash looking for the "perfect image" on Shutterstock.com. It's a tremendous waste of time. Instead, find some elements that you're willing to live with and simplify the rest. Spend more of the design time on the project after the initial launch.

If there is one thing I have learned from this website launch it's that the website will always be a work in progress. In order to get our website up quickly, our CEO helped me to focus on what really mattered and subsequently simplify our design approach. In the months and year to come you'll see some amazing changes on orangelogic.com. I can't wait for the world to see what we have in store!

What's next?

Well, now that we have a new website we're laser focused on generating some new business! So, if you don't mind sharing a little, please refer anyone looking for the leading SaaS Digital Asset Management solution to www.orangelogic.com.

Cheers.