Launching our redesigned website

Today, I’m proud to share that we’ve launched our newly redesigned website; bringing our vision and insights closer together in an engaging new home that tells the story of our work, the story of our partners and the story of our mission.

Why did we redesign?

When I joined FutureGov nearly three years ago, I’d just come off a series of rebranding and website build projects. I was noticeably biased towards reworking websites that weren’t adding value or telling a good story.

Before I started, I met Matt Skinner, our new CEO, to learn more about the organisation. During my first week, I met FutureGov's founder, Dominic Campbell, to hear more about the vision and mission for FutureGov. After these conversations, I returned to the website and thought, “one of these things is so clearly not like the others”. Here were two truly passionate people with big ambitions, leading a team of enthusiastic and passionate changemakers, with a very grey website that held little information.

Unfortunately three years ago, comms & marketing was new to FutureGov so we weren’t in a position to overhaul anything. We needed to build trust, build processes, build a team and importantly, build a consistent narrative across the business.

Within two years, we felt we’d achieved that. FutureGov was growing, taking on bigger projects with a wider impact and expanding the team. We were levelling up but our website sat behind, a poor reflection of our ambition. We even ran a discovery which proved our assumptions that the website was difficult to understand, didn’t show value and didn’t reflect who we are. We’d also joined The Panoply in that time and sat within a group of companies who all needed a branding overhaul. Perfect timing.

In January of 2020, we invited our friends at Lloyd Northover, who we’d met previously during our work with Homes England, to meet the group. They spent the next six months working across the group to create an aligned visual identity which could be individually tailored to reflect each company's individual culture. As The Panoply refers to it, “a culture of cultures”.

With their visual identity foundation laid, we needed to do more work adapting the design to reflect our personality. We’re fortunate in FutureGov to have a team with beautifully varied skills. With this aligned identity for a foundation, I enlisted two colleagues from different areas of our design team to “go wild”. They had free reign to explore different design concepts, to push at the edges of what we thought the FutureGov brand should look like. What I got back was about 200 slides of ideas. It was awesome.

We synthesised this flurry of new ideas into a strong visual core which many of you have already seen through our temporary homepage and new slide decks which launched last September.

With this now strong visual identity, we were in a position to finally take on the website rebuild. One tough question was do we do this in-house, with our team of talented designers and developers, or get help externally. There are of course pros and cons to each and with our team already stacked, we decided to enlist our friends at Deeson to help.

I have to say, this was a great decision and experience. With Deeson, we adapted our Google slide-led design into something visually compelling for the web, that levelled up our design to something that felt in line with where we’re at as an organisation. With their support, we distilled a Miro board web of layouts, components and functionality into what you see today.

One of the best parts of working with Deeson was watching an idea exchanged between myself and Sean Holden, Lead Designer on the project, make its way through the team as they added design and complexity to create an ideal user experience for both our content editors and website visitors.

Bringing our insights and work together

One of my biggest personal gripes is that our blog has always sat on Medium. There’s a belief that this industry centres around Medium, and while that might be true for many, our marketing teams efforts to expand the reach and awareness of FutureGov’s work with our clients turned this assumption on its head. We know our traffic doesn’t come from Medium, and as we saw with many other creators last year, people are starting to move away from the platform as terms and conditions are more closely read and paywalls are introduced.

For us, having our blog and incredibly valuable content sit somewhere separate from our site was something no amount of backlinking could fix. A core priority of building this new site had to be around bringing our insights and thought leadership home and linking them closely with our proven concepts.

We built the Insights section of the website to showcase “insights by sector”, or the lessons learned from work with clients and partners, and “insights by series”, where we share our thought leadership around specific topics and plan to expand into more human stories.

The best part of this, which you’ll even notice on this news article, is that beautiful sidebar. With that space, we have the ability to highlight other relevant, important parts of the website, connecting content, connecting learning and hopefully, sharing more value with our audience.

What’s next?

A website’s work is never done. We’ve only scratched the surface of migrating our blog to the insights section and connecting all the learning. And as I mentioned, we have big plans for the future of our content. We’re also thinking a lot about how we use ourselves, and this new tool, as a platform for the people we work alongside. You’ll see a few client testimonials and videos dotted around the website right now, but how might we use ourselves, even more, to lift up the stories of others?

Beyond our marketing, FutureGov has been through a big period of change. We're continuing to grow, learn and expand, and I think launching this website is a big reflection of that. This is a new season of FutureGov. Following Matt's leadership, we're looking now at how we build a stronger team, more connected team that will see us through this next chapter.

There’s a lot in store, and we’re excited.