How do we approach website building at Macromo
Hello everyone,
Sharing another big startup milestone today: we released a new version of our website at Macromo! 🎉 Go to macromo.com to check it out, but before you do it, I would like to talk about my thinking behind building websites.
Starting from the very beginning, we used to have a .org domain for almost two years - because the .com domain was kind of expensive. However, we decided to give ourselves an early Christmas present because we feel like a real company now with nearly 25 people! 💪
I try to approach website building in the same way as I go about building any kind of digital product - and I strongly believe that done is better than perfect. Being paralyzed by not releasing a website because it’s not perfect is a common issue for many young companies. But this will eventually hurt your company much more than going with an outdated website: your customers, future employees, and investors should be able to find you and learn about what you do. As long as it does the job, you can add the necessary touches, but it should be functional.
This is when and why you should create a process that pushes you to update your company’s website every couple of weeks. This way you can deal with minor imperfections in the next version, without putting off the actual launch.
👉 This is how this process looks at Macromo:
👩💻 Our Head of Marketing and I meet to plan what kind of changes we want to make. We prioritize our ideas and write a brief if needed.
✍️ Our copywriter creates content, and then she gives it to me and the marketing team for feedback. We try to keep the feedback loop brief, with one or two rounds usually being enough. We create all of the content in English and deal with translations later.
💻 Once we are happy with the content, we start to work on design and development. We are using Webflow, a no-code tool, so we merged these two steps into one. At the moment I’m doing this part. Not an ideal use of the co-founder, however, I have both design and development experience, which makes me a good candidate 😁 Plus I really enjoy it - I usually take it as a fun weekend project.
⏱️ Once the development is done, we publish the new version to a DEV environment. This gives space to our QA tester and marketing to go through it. Next, they create tickets in ClickUp when they find something that should be fixed. Fun fact: I used to work for ClickUp as a designer and now we use it for project management at Macromo!
🇨🇿 We are based in Europe, which means we need to translate the website into many languages. We use Weglot, which autotranslates everything - and then our team of translators double-checks it. We hired an international marketing team specifically, so people speaking different languages can do this kind of work.
🟢 Then we release the new version - to repeat everything in a few weeks!
And this is the process we follow to create and update our company’s website. Changing the domain has been a big step, but it doesn’t change the flow - and there’s always a lot of work in progress that you shouldn’t be afraid of when running a startup.
Thank you all for reading and I wish you a great weekend ahead,
Eva.