Watching That

Creating a new marketing site, from concept to production

I do marketing design as well! I led the content creation, design and development of Watching That's new website. It was really satisfying taking this project from start to finish.

Setting the right tone

Once there was a comprehensive content map in place, outlining the different pages and sections we would need, the first thing I worked on was assessing what we wanted the public image of the company to be.

I held a meeting where attendees were encouraged to come up with phrases that they thought describe the company well or describe its aspirations.

We summarised the results as five adjectives that everybody agreed represented what we strive for:

  • Human
  • Expert
  • Approachable
  • Friendly
  • Experienced

I used those as guiding principles to set the right tone for both the copy and the aesthetics. I think the result is clean, professional and friendly whilst avoiding an overly corporate image. At least that's what I hope we achieved.

The Great Gatsby

This was my first time using the Gatsby framework and I have to say it was quite amazing. I'm already used to creating components in React (because that's what we use for the Watching That web application) but this was my first time getting into GraphQL—which in this context is being used to loop through markdown files.

It really makes it easy to build blazingly fast websites, our lighthouse score for performance is 99 and that's really without trying very hard because Gatsby and its plugins pretty much provide that for you 'out of the box'.

Continuous integration, hosting and CMS functionality are all done via Netlify.