We spend hours building and designing websites for everyone else so it was very hard to find the time to work on our own. As it often the way, the project took a little longer than usual for builds of a similar size, but that’s because our clients always come first!
Most importantly, we all identified the need to work on our own website and the value it would bring, so at the beginning of the year when we decided to give gosoto.co a revamp we absolutely knew we had to get it right.
The last five years has seen Soto move from a company that used a cartoon toaster for a logo (we do still love the Toastie!) to a company that is market competitive, slick and representative of the work we deliver. Year on year we have grown in clients, projects, support and as a company. We believe our new website really captures where Soto is at as an organisation and where we are going in the future.
Design wise we’ve always had a particular style; using rounded fonts, soft and tactile modules, bold colours (hello, orange!). We’ve kept our signature Soto style to stay on brand and be consistent, but we’ve moved away from the orangeness of our previous site and introduced lots of rich, warm outdoor photography. Using our strapline ‘digital is in our nature,’ Pete (Soto designer extraordinaire) carefully incorporated stunning backdrops and scenery into our brand, and we absolutely love it. Since the initial website designs we’ve used this imagery for our business cards, proposal documents, backdrops and canvasses at the Business Showcase and much more.
We’re all environmental advocates individually and so the entire team does their bit to ensure the business is too – we even have reusable coffee pods for our Nespresso machine!
We love the outdoors and proactively support time offline; last year we launched Disconnect Day, a day to switch off from the digital world. We’re website geeks 95% of the time, but it’s good to take a break. This evolution of our brand and website is totally us; a perfect balance of digital and nature.
Moving on the build, this website was a real team effort, with lots of important client projects taking priority it was really tough to get our own site moving. Laura, one of our developers took the lead role and did an amazing job building the site whilst we simultaneously populated it with new and existing content. The result is a really slick website that guides the user to exactly what they want to know – who we are, what we do and what we’ve been working on… then how to get in touch!
The proof is in the pudding, since launching the new site we’ve had a significant increase in enquiries, page views and a 10% decrease in our bounce rate. We’ve even crept up on the Google search rankings. Overall we think we’ve ticked all the boxes we set out to, showcasing our very talented team and everything that Soto does best.
