I interviewed my pretty rad boss and all around geek for good, Exygy’s CEO and founder Zach Berke, about our new website.

Can you tell me about our website history and how we came to where we are now?

We launched the old website in June of 2008. Before that we had a one page static HTML page that I set up. We put up the new one because my buddy Luke Fretwell was bugging the hell out of me to get something decent up. He talked me into hiring him to help with the design. He did great work and we were super excited to have a great new site — especially compared to the one page static thing. Luke’s work felt fresh for a couple of years at least. But by 2010 we were ready to re-do it… and well its now 2013.

We tried at least one time to do it — we had a designer on staff, Madelin Woods, who was great but unfortunately she left us to go to Square right in the middle of the re-design project! So the project died. So that was the first attempt and it died in end of 2011.

Phil, our CCO, started it again in early 2013, and we’ve been slowly getting the design done when we have a few moments to breathe between doing our client work.

So it started in early 2013 … but it launched in August. What took so long? How did we finally manage to launch?

Even with having our CCO leading our design staff working on the website was still slower than we would have liked because we’re a small services business and as a services business you are always focused on client work because it pays the bills.

Finally, we decided it was time to “practice what we preach” and go MVP. There is a lot more that we want to do with the website — this is not “the final” site by any means, but it’s leaps and bounds above where we were at. Still, this is really the first pass. Our plan is to have a website sprint twice a month or so to work on the website and improve it. If we don’t do that we fear we will be quickly back in a position where this thing feels old.

Going MVP was definitely the right decision. There are whole sections of the site that we want to be doing custom design work on, there are tons of content that needs to be written and re-written. But still, we are proud of the MVP and see it as a great foundation to build on.

What do you hope the new website does more successfully?

It has a lot of fun, just like we do at Exygy. The color palette, which I think is really fun with its contrasts and 70s flair, is a great example of that.

I’m really happy to have a website we can be proud of — that is a true example of the quality work we do. I hope it is not only beautiful itself, but does a great job showcasing some of our best work like the Endangered Languages Project that we did for Google and our work for Skoll.

I hope this site is a foundation for us to do a better job connecting with and engaging our potential social impact clients.

What did you like best about the design process for the website?

We have been really lucky to have Phil lead the design and do something that represents the quality of the design work that we do. It’s important that we launch a custom designed site, built from scratch — because that’s how we do our best work with our clients and our site should represent that. I also really liked the paper prototyping that we did. We had a lot of elements and lots of different ways that we wanted to lay them out. Phil drew things out, scanned them, cut them out and pasted them all over the tables in the office. Another time we printed wire frames and put them on the whiteboard and drew all over them. Those were really important parts of our strategic design process for the site.

The site is built on WordPress — tell me more about that.

No kidding. I don’t really need to say anything about how awesome and simple WordPress is. Obviously we were going to build it on WordPress. Using WordPress is extremely important for us. It’s going to make it easy to keep it updated it and search engine friendly. And we built it in no time (once the design was done) because we are so damn good with WordPress.  The production took us a week and half after the design took us five years! As far as what we can do with WordPress, this website is so simple. We build applications now on WordPress, but this is really just a content managed website — the simplest thing we do with WordPress, which WordPress does really well. There are a few custom post types, portfolio pieces and services and things but we can do this with our eyes closed.

Was there anything new that you tried with the Exygy website?

This was the biggest responsive design project we’d done, when we started it. Since then, we’ve done a lot of responsive, but this was the first big one we started from scratch. We learned that the design work for responsive websites is quite time consuming while implementing responsive design in code – if the design is done well – is really easy.

We also went in with the idea of “mobile first”. But we learned that “first” is kind of misnomer. It implies you do mobile, you finish it, then you do desktop. That’s wrong. Its really more about going back and forth: mobile to desktop, mobile to desktop. Mobile first is a nice easy-to-digest phrase, but I don’t think that it mattered what we did it “first”, but more we were thinking about both mobile + desktop at the same time.

What was the hardest piece of the new website?

Hardest piece for us has been content. Leveraging outside resources was important. We hired a copywriter to help write the team descriptions, that was helpful. And then doing some sprints in house and sitting down as a team and saying “screw it — just write some stuff, now!” That is how we got it done. Send calendar invites out and get people into a room heads down to just get it done. The most productive sessions we’ve had on the site have been when we all sat down at the table and wrote / produced content / fixed bugs, etc.

So what does the new website say about where Exygy is heading?

On the whole we have never been intentional about marketing. Our whole business has been about doing great work and having business referred to us by word of mouth. We started with tiny non-profits and built our way to Google.org and the UN, just by doing great work and being referred to the next slightly bigger client. The new website is sort of a recognition that it’s time for us to grow up and be more intentional about our marketing. We are really excited that the new website will be a foundation for all our marketing efforts. Finally we have a site that shows the quality of work that we do.

What’s the best part of having a new website?

Not having to say “The Cobbler’s Kids Wear No Shoes” every time I mention our URL. I’ve said that on average every day for the past two years. I’m pretty excited to forget that cliche for a while.