A Glow-up, not a Teardown
Refining a national security services and technology firm’s unique voice then designing and re-platforming 113 pages into 15 to match it
ENGAGEMENT AT A GLANCE
Client
Morgan Business Consulting — a services and technology firm supporting national security programs, based in Arlington, Virginia, in business since 2003.
Challenge
A firm with a genuinely distinctive culture and a twenty-plus-year track record had a ‘fine’ website that lacked the organization’s whimsy.
Approach
Our brand workshop experience explored and established the MBC voice so that we could structure, design, and build the site to that standard.
Key Results
113 legacy URLs consolidated into 15 pages, a site architecture built out of the company’s own initials, and 90+ mobile PageSpeed at launch without tuning.
INDUSTRY CONTEXT
Government contracting has a house style to which no one aspires. Every firm is a trusted partner. Every firm is mission-critical. Every firm delivers world-class, industry-leading solutions. The language is so uniform that it stops transmitting information at all; which is a strange outcome for an industry whose entire business is proving it can be trusted with things that matter.
THE CHALLENGE
MBC’s problem was not that it lacked personality. It had an unusual amount of it, actually, but it was only reflected in glimpses on their most global footprint – their website. The old site had accumulated 100+ live URLs, with extensive content overlap and no clear canon except for their manifesto. Underneath, the platform itself had also aged out: an old version of PHP presented not only a ceiling on capability, but a real security risk.
OUR APPROACH
Align
The alignment work was a 90-minute workshop: seven exercises run with the co-CEOs who had so carefully crafted their internal culture. We quickly identified the core purposes of their site: attracting recruits, retaining employees, and holding steady during a prospect’s diligence phase. This was not intended to be an SEO offensive nor a detailed expose of their client work; the site simply needed to be an accurate celebration of what makes them tick so that folks know they’re worth joining, they’re worth staying for, and they’re worth working with.
Define
When asked about retention, MBC’s answer was the opposite of what the category expects:
“We don’t need you to stay forever. We need you to be the right person in the right seat for the time that you’re here. If we’re a stepping stone for a year, that doesn’t mean I’m going to fire you — it means I can start planning, and we can both get what we need out of this for however long it lasts.” — Jenn Rosecrans, Co-CEO
Her co-CEO Alex put the same idea in a different way: “We want to be a chapter in their story — the long chapter, the short chapter, the first, or the last. It doesn’t really matter to us.”
Right person, right seat. This defined the site: a recruiting site that boasts an advantage that almost nobody else in the category can honestly claim.
Execute
The refreshed site structure came from the company’s own initials: Mission, Business, Capabilities – three leads with everything else underneath. We collapsed the original site by 87% to refine it to a targeted core of 15 pages. The clean up was done with care via redirects intricately routed to preserve SEO. The build runs on Crisp, our own WordPress site builder including block theme and plugin suite, in its first production deployment and scored above 90 in mobile PageSpeed at launch before anyone tuned anything. This performance mattered, because the site launched in parallel with a live ad campaign in Washington, D.C.
THE OUTCOME
113 URLs
15 pages
Built around the brand: Mission, Business, Capabilities
90+ PageSpeed on mobile
First production deployment of Crisp
One voice, three audiences
Written for the recruit, the current employee, and the customer doing diligence.
LOOKING AHEAD
MBC now has something most firms its size do not: a written, specific framework for how it sounds, tied directly to a site architecture that manifests its own manifesto. Adding a capability no longer means adding a tab. Writing a job posting no longer means starting from a blank page and drifting back toward “world-class.” The next pages, whenever they come, have a starting point and a standard to meet.
The client said it better than we could. This was originally about the navy blue theme, and it turned out to describe the whole company:
“It’s not bright. It’s not trying too hard, but it’s also not just plain black. It accomplishes a lot by just being itself.” — Jenn Rosecrans, Co-CEO
ABOUT ALWAYS CURIOUS
Always Curious is a strategy-led team of innovators who design and build the systems and brands that set the stage for evolution and growth. We combine technical excellence with deep attention to the human workflows and business objectives that systems exist to serve.
If your company is more interesting than its website makes it sound, reach out to [email protected].