Article Highlights
- A resource for the commerce industry
- Education for prospects
- Global search
- Robust tagging & filtering
- Case studies
- Insights
- A platform for internal teams
- Integrating sales & marketing workflows
- Flexible & intuitive CMS
- Notification menu
- Seamless job postings
Our new agency site: a new digital ecosystem
Hello - I’m Trey and I lead the redesign and rebuild of Domaine’s new website. We thought it’d be worthwhile to talk through some of our goals with the relaunch:
- To create a site that could double as a resource for the ecommerce industry in general but Shopify specifically, illustrating how we build innovation and revenue growth for our clients on the Shopify platform
- To create a platform that supports all of our internal teams (not just sales and marketing)
- To innovate on the site build itself by integrating multiple tech partners into an easy-to-use and flexible framework that can grow as we grow
To put it simply, we wanted the launch of Domaine’s new site to be a declaration of who we are and where we are going. The first version of our agency site was a transitional step — a way to announce the merger and introduce our new name. At that time, there were still traces of our old identities, with remnants of both Half Helix and Tomorrow sprinkled throughout our digital identity.
With this new site, we’re establishing our global scale & commerce expertise across industries and verticals. We believe the new design communicates the breadth and depth of our experience, while also showcasing the flexibility and adaptability of the new Domaine brand system.
A resource, not just a portfolio
At our core, we’re not just a development shop, nor are we a boutique design studio – we’re a full-service enterprise ecommerce brand partner. We create high-converting, content-driven site experiences for some of the biggest brands in ecommerce - so we wanted to incorporate some of our learnings into our digital presence, ideally becoming a resource for others who are solving similar challenges.
Driven by this ethos, we incorporated proven ecommerce patterns into our redesign to build a platform that supports a broad range of user journeys, anticipating that we’ll have a diverse audience visiting our site - from brand merchants, to website designers, to CIOs. So we built extensive discovery features into our UI.. The new site is designed to be a living, breathing resource that evolves with us.
An educational resource for ecommerce brands
Above all, our site needs to serve as a way for potential clients to understand who we are, what we do, and if we’re a good potential partner for their business needs. But we also want it to serve as an educational hub for ecommerce brands looking for inspiration and commerce thought leadership. To achieve this, we’ve built a robust set of features that encourage discovery
Global Search
Our global search indexes any query across three content categories: Insights, Features, and Partners.
From the very beginning, we knew that search would be a pivotal feature of our site experience. With so much content (over 500 pages, and counting) on the site, easy and accessible content navigation was crucial, but we realized users may not expect such a robust search feature on an agency site.To support discovery, we incorporated pre-populated search content to give users an idea of the types of content they could uncover through our global site search.
Robust tagging & filtering
Communicating the interrelated nature of our projects was an important challenge of designing and building our new agency site. Services, features, industries, insights, and projects overlap in countless ways, so we built a robust system of relational tagging, allowing us to relate any piece of content with any other, regardless of type. This structure allows us to build highly-personalized content no matter where on-site you are, or what content you’re currently viewing.
Case Studies
As any service partner can attest to, creating Case Studies is a challenge. We created a two-tone color palette for our case study pages, which our designers and marketing team members can easily define within our CMS. Our flexible template makes each project feel dynamic and unique. We spent a lot of time on the “product cards” for each project, intending to make them feel somewhat ‘shoppable’ - also by adding a small ecom product image to each card, We believe the net effect showcases the variety of industries we work with.
Our insights
To truly serve as an educational resource for brands, we need to ensure that our content library speaks to the needs of brands who are researching Domaine for their next big project. Our new site gives us the tools to regularly publish fresh content into areas of the site where it’s most relevant. For example, our recent Migrations series shares insights to brands across multiple platforms who are considering Shopify, and now we have multiple avenues to personalize content to those users based on the content they engage with.
A platform that services our entire agency
Secondarily, our site is meant to serve as a resource for all of our internal departments. We surveyed our company and identified a broad range of needs that our agency site could address. We ultimately built a site that serves all teams, not just sales & marketing.
Integrating Sales & Marketing workflows
Our primary focus is our revenue team, who uses Hubspot to manage inbound leads, active opportunities, industry events, and more. While we knew that a tight integration with Hubspot would be critical, we soon recognized that we couldn’t rely on their out-of-the-box solutions to give us the control we needed. So we built a custom solution that allows our Marketing team to build & manage on-site forms within Hubspot while leveraging the performance benefits of statically-built native HTML forms. Our marketing team now has full control without any need for code injection from external Hubspot scripts, ensuring flexible, layout-shifting and eliminating the unpredictability of injected Hubspot forms.
A flexible & intuitive CMS
While we have a large team of experienced engineers, our goal was to build a framework that didn’t rely on them for content upload of any kind. We built a robust CMS (Content Management System) on Sanity which allows team members across various departments to make content changes to our service offerings, sub-pages, build out hidden marketing-only pages, and deploy edits and updates. This gives each department complete control over their specific content without the need for developer support.
Notification menu
We want our site to be something users can revisit to discover fresh content, new insights, and updates on events, but in a way that doesn’t spam users with irrelevant information at the wrong time. To account for this — and to introduce a bit of whimsy into our site — we incorporated a notification menu highlighting our latest case studies, upcoming events, careers, and more. This gives us a way to surface new content as needed and to give users a simple way to see our latest content in a quick, concise format.
Seamless job postings
As an ever-growing global service partner, hiring is a big priority for every department. While we use Rippling for a variety of HR-related functions, it is particularly useful to provide an up-to-date job listings feature on-site. The Rippling API allows department leads to manage their own job openings and have those listings simultaneously posted on both our Careers page as well as other job boards. This simplifies our hiring processes and centralizes all of our applications into one place.
A few final thoughts
At its core, the new Domaine agency site is built to evolve. As we continue to expand into new disciplines, regions and technologies, we recognize that the commerce ecosystem will grow with us. Our new site is not just a reflection of where we are today—but also a vision of where we want to go.
