Godjira Website

We thought it would be best to start off our portfolio pages with the latest site we have been working on and that’s our own!

The old Godjira site was starting to look a bit tired, it was bold and bright and easy to use, but needed updating to use more of the screen real estate. We also wanted to be able to use it to feed our Social Media pages like Facebook and Twitter.

First we came up with a new logo. The G in Godjira is two G’s joined together and is also meant to look like an @ sign. We matched this all up with a font that would let us join the G’s together.

We definitely knew we wanted to use WordPress as the engine to drive the site. WordPress is great. It may have started off as a blogging platform, but it’s got so much built in functionality it’s ideal for sites where you want to put lots of new content on especially if you want to drive your Social Media pages from it. Straight out of the box, it already lets you write news articles and generate RSS feeds. With a little tweaking, you can be feeding Facebook, Twitter and lots more.

Over the last couple of years our “proposition” has kind of evolved in to three things: New Sites, Work on existing sites and Interesting Things. We wanted to make sure the new site reflected that so split the main content up in to exactly those three categories.

Traditionally, web companies have used stock imagery of office blocks, satellites and other abstract business concepts. Those are boring, hackneyed and tame. We like kittens and monkeys and baby pandas. I’m pretty sure most people prefer those to yet another picture of a satellite dish or a smirking girl in a headset.

The most important pages in the new site will be the portfolio pages. We are going to write a little case study for each one, very much like this and talk about what the customer wanted, what we did and what the result was. We will try to get a fair few up before Xmas. The new site has only been going for a couple of days, but the statistics seem to back up what we were already thinking. That these days the things people are looking for on websites are “interesting things”. In most cases, that’s stories and people. So we  are going to give you what you want. Stories and People.

The site does some clever things too. We’ve linked our RSS feed in to Facebook, so our Facebook page gets the latest stories. We’ve linked it in to Twitter too and daisy chained all of them together so we can write something once and send it out to all sorts of different media at the same time. We did think about using Ping.FM to join everything up, but there the danger is that you will be just broadcasting and not actually interacting with your fans and followers. It’s supposed to be *social* media. Let’s all be sociable!

We also signed up to MailChimp at the same time. We’ve been working with MailChimp for customers for a while now and it was just a matter of time before we got round to using it ourselves. It’s an excellent mailing list manager, with a super friendly admin interface that links in to things like Facebook, Twitter and Google Analytics and Contacts effortlessly.

Another super cool feature is the LiveZilla live chat client. This lets you chat in real time to someone using the site. It also gathers live statistics. It’s really funny watching exactly how people are browsing your site, but it has definitely reinforced our opinions on Interesting Things.

Every website should have one of those “Under Construction” banners on them. Like painting the Forth Bridge, websites are *never* finished. This one is no exception. We are going to tell you all about the sites we have done and are working on and lots of exciting new projects we have coming up like our £150 Tradesman’s package and our blogging deal.