You And Your Website.
According to legendary headhunter Liz Harold in last week’s Campaign, teams ought to have a website for their work.
Well, not to be outdone by the multitude of students and juniors who possess such a thing, Daryl and I have committed some of our ads to the worldwide cybernet. (We used to have a mac.com site but it seemed a bit crappy and it’s nice having a proper url.)
When you do this, you have a choice: functional and simple or whistles and bells.
The advantage of the first is that you can show your sweet, sweet stuff without anything getting in the way. When we had a 2D portfolio and reel (actually, we still have those things, but they are embarrassingly 2006) we didn’t present them in a pop-up book (we thought about it but the whole thing seemed like a bit of a chore), so why have a KER-AZEE website? Even super-progressive, cutting edge agencies go for clean and simple, so it seemed like a good idea to do the same? CDs just want to navigate through your work quickly and easily. They don’t have time to enter ‘Rick and Hector’s Admongous Theme Park’.
The only time whistles and bells are better is if you are a digital creative and, more specifically, a website designer. Under those circumstances, the medium is the message, so go all out.
Some of the stuff is work we’ve CD’d rather than done ourselves, and some of it was created with previous partners, but the job of the site is not to get into niggly minutiae; agencies often show work done by teams that are no longer there, and we think that’s OK, so long as there’s enough of a connection to justify its inclusion.
Do you have a website? Is it as wanky as a teenager in a Razzle factory, or as straightforward as the instruction manual for a sock?