August 14, 2008
Thanks @itafroma (That’s Mark Trapp for you non-twitter folks) for tagging the Bear Brook site in del.icio.us with my accrit tag.
Positioning: Bear Brook Design’s positioning, clearly declared on the home page, is “experts in entertainment and media marketing.” This expertise is demonstrated front and center with a rotating series of entertainment-oriented work samples. The portfolio further proves their expertise with clients consisting of radio, television, media and arts organizations. Their range of services is refreshingly kept to four: Branding, Environment, Print, and Web/Interactive. True, these categories do cover a lot of ground. But at least they don’t go out of their way to list every possible area of service as though they were afraid to leave any opportunity uncovered.
One of the real strength of Bear Brooks positioning is under utilized. They have an entirely separate website that describes their unique “Brandopoly” solution. This looks like a highly refined offering. It certainly differentiates them and demonstrates expertise. I would make more of this on the website. They do link to it off the homepage, and it is listed under “Services,” but such a powerful tool should have more of a site wide presence, perhaps even it’s own navigation tab.
Content: The site’s content is good, but could be pushed further. I’m happy to see some commentary on all the portfolio detail pages, and the news section is updated regularly. They also have a resources section with a handful of thoughtful articles. I would add article dates, in order to establish an expectation for update frequency. With such a focused position though, establishing a more robust content strategy, perhaps integrating a blog, should be quite attainable.
Platform: Bear Brook is running Drupal as a CMS so I’m sure they’ll have no problems making site updates. The page coding is clean and should give search engines no trouble. The URL structure gets a little long (too many slashes) as you dig down into the content (ex. http://bearbrook.com/about/news/2008/bear-brook-brands-bethel-woods). Since the most robust content pages end up with the longest URL they’ll take a small hit in search results. This is minor issue but could be improved (Note: whenever changing URL structures remember to use 301 redirects for the current page URLs). I love it that they use unique title tags for each page! But they could be more strategic in the choice of phrases.
Design: The visual design is very clean, intuitive and easy to use. It’s sign of web maturity when a design agency shows restraint on the overall visual design in order to promote the work, the thinking and the content. While the website won’t show up in Communication Arts Interactive annual (and I don’t think agency sites should be aiming for this) it is a refreshingly clean site, with an attractive design and no significant interface problems.
