A Belated Website Launch

Muse is proud to share that we launched a new website!

…in 2025.

It’s taken some time to put together a post about it because, as with most things when you’re a marketing company, marketing yourself tends to be low on your priority list. But I think it’s important to take stock of big projects like developing a new website, and share any insights or ideas that emerged as a part of finishing a project like this one. What did we learn?

For our website, the biggest thing I think I learned is that most advertising and marketing agency websites are bad. Really bad.

When you work as a creative professional, it can sometimes feel frustrating to always be working on other people’s projects; always solving other people’s problems; always doing it within the boundaries of what they’re comfortable doing. It’s this reality that gives me the feeling that a lot of marketing, branding, web design and advertising agencies decide to use their own websites as a chance to let loose and do all the crazy things they wish they could do for their client work.

And as a result, a lot of these sites are functionally unusable.

Portfolios will take minutes to load complicated animations, your cursor will transform into a giant ball or a star for no meaningful reason, the headings will overwhelm, the language is lofty and pretentious, the navigation is typically unusable, you’re rarely sure where to click and you only get the chance to experience all that if you haven’t had a seizure from the frenetic, hyper-fast-paced editing of the highlight reel that plays the second the homepage loads.

To put it bluntly: I hate all this. So what did we try to do differently?

Keeping it Simple

When we approached a new website for Muse, I’ll confess that I had a bit of an agenda in mind. My number one goal for the site was to make it as simple as possible in almost every aspect. Simple to build, simple to write for, simple to make artwork for, simple to update and, most importantly, simple for people to use. This meant needing to let go of things. Animation, complex layouts, fancy plugins, excessive video. Even the colour of some backgrounds had to be reined in to avoid adding complexity to the functionality.

This was clearly an imperfect goal, because the most truly simple website would have no styling at all, meaning we would have to remove our branding (fonts, colours, logos) and rely on the basic HTML to communicate everything. Like a website from the 90s! As fun as that might sound to a nerd like me, it clearly wouldn’t be the best idea for a website in the 21st century. So we compromised that goal to try to find a middle ground: making a site that’s as simple as it can be while still doing what we need it to.

In order to make that happen, we had to be clear about what our goals were for the site. What do we need it to do?

As a website for our business, it needs to communicate who we are and what we do. Importantly, we also believe that means communicating “why” we do what we do, as well. What values are important to our work? What are the ideas and beliefs we would bring from this work into any other job we do? What would make someone want to work with us instead of anyone else offering similar services?

As a website promoting our services, it was also important for it to showcase some of the work we have done. While some agencies seem to go all-in on sharing everything they’ve ever made, that can be overwhelming and we knew that our work should be curated. Interestingly, we also found that some agencies go in the opposite direction, having single-page websites showcasing no work at all and simply sharing a way to get in touch. Confident? Yes! Useful? That’s debatable.

It became clear we needed to ask ourselves a question: why should we put something in our portfolio? Is it simply to show how much we do? To try to prove we have the experience we say we do? In our case, it became more about sharing what we have learned through doing the work and how the client influenced the creative solutions we developed together. That collaborative relationship was what we wanted to showcase, because that carries as much value (if not more) as the finished products we create.

We also wanted our site to be a repository for our thinking. A blog can become a catch-all dump for people to try to generate as many SEO optimized posts as they can, but a blog that creates value should exist because you want to write it, not because you want the benefits of it being there. Why else would anyone read it? Our experience and opinions on our industry are what we wanted to share in our blog, which is what you’re reading right now.

Finally, the obvious things a website should do should be there. How do you get in touch with us? And who even are we? Amazingly, some people manage to find a way to make this part complicated, too, but having an About and Contact page isn’t boring or predictable. It’s helpful.

Cool Website ≠ Good Website

I don’t mean to call out our fellow designers, marketers and web developers with this post. Well… actually, I guess I do.

I truly don’t understand why our new website is so much simpler and more effective than some incredibly huge agencies. While I won’t point to any directly (my point is that this is a bigger issue than any one firm’s site), it seems to me like the primary driving motivation behind the websites of large agencies is prestige. They aren’t sharing their work to help people understand what they do or how they approach their craft. Instead, much of it is uselessly vague and polished to the point of feeling artificial. Now, granted, at Muse we rarely land multi-million dollar contracts with global brands, but when I look at the portfolios of the agencies that do, I question if I’d even want to. None of what I see on these sites is particularly inspiring, and it doesn’t seem to make them good at communicating their own value, either.

Muse’s work is meant to embody everything about our clients. We want to offer our experience, abilities and insights to clients who could use them. Our portfolio can seem eclectic at times because, in a very real way, one of the principal creative directors changes with each one: the client. That’s why we don’t have a giant grid of work in our portfolio, and that’s why we don’t just list a selection of itemized services for you to pick from a-la-carte.

When we built our website, we wanted it to be simple. But we also wanted it to speak to who we are: approachable, collaborative and creative people that you are welcome to speak to and work with. Maybe these other agencies’ sites aren’t that bad after all. Maybe they represent who they are, too: pretentious, overbearing, and unwilling to help people understand what they do.

…I guess I am really calling people out, aren’t I? 🤫

So welcome to Muse’s “new” website! We hope you find it easy (enough) to use, enjoyable to explore, and that it helps you understand who we are. At the end of the day, what else should you really expect a website to do?