New year, new us! Behind the scenes of our website redesign

As every agency knows, when you’re putting your heart and soul into your clients’ websites all the time, it’s easy for your own digital presence to get left behind. But every once in a while, a moment comes along that sparks a change – a transformation that’s not just seen, but felt. For us at KOTA, that moment was the realisation that our trusty old website, a loyal companion for years, was ready to pass the torch.

Let’s delve into the why and the how of our latest digital glow-up.

Why create a new website?

It’s the same story that many of our clients come to us with. Our website had been the digital face of our agency for years. But as we evolved, so did our story. Our brand tone of voice and agency values had undergone a refresh, making our previous site more of a relic than a representation. We’d grown out of it.

Our team has expanded, and our service offerings have been sharpened like a fine blade. It was time for a change; a new digital canvas that not only mirrored our growth and our culture, but also facilitated our ambition to climb those SEO rankings like there was no tomorrow and win even bigger, bolder projects.

The design

We were aiming for something that reflected our sharpened skills and capabilities as a design agency. But while we wanted to show off that expertise in a more sophisticated way, we also wanted to make sure our playful spirit shone through. And to align with our ethos as a creative agency, we needed something that could be experienced, not just seen.

Recently, we created a 10-year microsite that ended up being like an immersive 3D universe rather than a standard website, and we wanted to reflect some of those skills within our new digital home. So, we brought back Cyd Stumpel who helped us make that microsite a reality, and joined forces with her to breathe life into our vision of interactive fluid gradients that dance at your cursor’s command.

We wanted to put the emphasis on creativity in motion. With interactive backgrounds and animations to showcase our skills, every pixel is infused with movement to encourage users to explore and click around.

The development

Development-wise, we waved goodbye to our old friend Gatsby and embraced our new (and preferred) front-end framework, Next.js.

WordPress, our tried and trusted ally, stayed on as our CMS, flexing its muscles in a headless setup separate from the front-end. This means we can be a bit more inventive with our site while working with a familiar platform.

We leaned into the magic of Next.js’s on-demand revalidation to ensure our site wasn’t just a pretty face, but a speed demon at loading pages. But the real hero is our WebGL shaders, crafting fluid animations that felt as light as a feather, without skimping on the visual feast.

 

The results so far

It’s early days, but has our digital facelift paid off? Here are the numbers so far:

• A 95.4% uptick in average engagement time suggests the site is making the impression we’d hoped!
• Event counts per session jumped up by 68.4%, turning casual browsers into explorers.
• Our engagement rate has soared by 28.35% while our bounce rate has reduced by 10%.
• Views per user doubled, showing our content’s newfound magnetism.
• And the cherry on top? During that dreaded, tumultuous March Google core update, our visibility on search has significantly increased for some of our most coveted keywords.

So far, so good. But as any great web design agency knows, a website is an evolving entity that’s never truly finished. We’ll continue to monitor, refresh, and keep upping the game with every iteration.

In the end, our new website build is more than just a facelift. It’s a reflection of our journey, our ethos, and our stubborn commitment to not just keep up with the times, but to set the pace. Let us know what you think!