The day before our new TeamBonding website went live I was on a call with a potential strategic partner who said, “I just love your website, the colors, the design, the overall feel and it is the best one I have seen from a team building company”.  On a typical day this conversation this would make me feel proud as we put a lot of time into developing and maintaining the website but since the newly designed site was going up the next day, I got a little nervous and I started questioning myself.  Was the new design necessary? Did the new site have the fun and interaction of the current site?  Would people like it and most of all would it work? 

 

 The goals for this website redesign were different and we had what I would consider an all-star a team of people working on all aspects of the site with the goal not only to get more people to the website and not as many SEO consultants suggest to get them to call or contact us right away, the goal was User Experience, or UX/UI design.  I wanted the new user, our potential and repeat clients to have a great experience on the website so that they could easily find what they were looking for, and so that they can get a feel for the kind of team building company that we are and see and hear from clients just like them. 

 The first call was to Acceleration Partners which is owned by Robert Glazer, who I met as President of the Boston chapter of EO, Entrepreneurs Organization.  Bob’s company was an INC 500 company again, much higher on the list than TeamBonding was on the Inc. 5000.  His team of designers and analysts did an extensive review and heat map of the website to find out what part of the site people used so that we could focus on what was important to our audience.   I also caught a lucky break with my friend Michael Dukes, currently, Creative Director at Red Pepper in Nashville and the original copywriter for TeamBonding from many years ago to give us some hours fine-tuning the voice of the site so that our message was clear and the fun and purpose came out in the copy.  In addition we Colin our SEO writer back on the team so people could find our site, our graphic designer Sarah helping change some of the graphics including the logo with our new tagline, Cabe, our website developer and Merove and Joanne from AP working on the design of the site.  This virtual team of people that were building the new site were from Chicago, Ontario, St. Augustine, Sarasota, San Francisco, Nashville, and Boston.

Samantha McDuffee, our Director of Marketing and I put in hundreds of hours creating new content, adding photos, editing blogs and testing the site.  We added new sections the Innovation Lab and a new category for Escape Game and Live-Action Adventures.  The new site is now up and so far the site has been well-received but like our business, this team effort took a leap of faith and a belief that although we had a website that everyone loved, we could do better.  I hope you like it as I have been told this is only Phase One.