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The Marblehead agency site is an interesting case. The main website is typical of most agency sites, perhaps even a minimalist example. But their blog is excellent. Jeremiah Owyang often boldly asserts that the “corporate website” is irrelevant. I don’t agree but here’s a case where the agency’s blog is far more robust and sophisticated than the main site. And I think it serves them well.
Let’s start with their positioning. The home page identifies their positioning as “a marketing and design firm that can help you improve the value of your customer relationships.” That’s an intriguing positioning statement. It has potential. But I need to know a bit more about how and for whom for it to be persuasive. Their main navigation labels are a bit vague “identify, innovate, inspire, improve.” But the identify page talks about data management and business analytics. This starts to answer a bit of the “how” question for me. It starts to differentiate them. Although most agencies say they evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns, this page seems to indicate that Marblehead goes deeper in this regard. The “improve” section give a bit more detail about how they use analytics, dashboards, and customer scorecards but they don’t provide details or examples. The main site leaves me a bit unclear on how their focus on data and measurement relates to improving the value of customer relationships.
The positioning breaks down a little when I view the services (inspire) page, where the horizontal positioning broadens out to include all the stuff every firm offers (print, web, identity, logo, design). Ironically, if you dig down deep enough you’ll find that under the “about us” tab there is another list for services that is much more compelling. It lists Data Warehousing, Data Integration, Data Management, Customer Relationship Management, Campaign Management, Relationship Marketing, and Marketing Segmentation among their services. These particulars make them different from many other design and marketing firms. It’s odd that the main “inspire” page lists generic services when they offer such fine-tuned, differentiating services. Why bury these under the about us page? Another positioning weakness is reflected in their client list which doesn’t indicate any vertical industry focus.
The content of the main site is weak. But the blog is much more robust. It’s odd to me that an agency that has devoted so much attention and effort on their blog would leave their main site so sparse. I really like their blog. They’ve designed an advanced layout and feature set, but more importantly they have a clear content strategy and it serves to bolster their main positioning statement.
The platform for their main site leaves much to be desired, but their blog platform is excellent. They use WordPress for the blog and it’s fairly well optimized for SEO. The URL structure could be improved by changing the permalink setting. The default date setting adds too many slashes in the URLs. I also think more thought could be put into their browser titles. But all things considered it’s an excellent blog. The main site though is less ideal. The transition effect they achieve is nice, but in my opinion it’s not worth obfuscating the content behind indistinguishable URLs and a single generic browser title. At least the sites not built entirely in Flash.
The visual design of the site, especially the blog is excellent. I’m less impressed with the main site though. It’s unnecessary to make the navigation less intuitive simply for the sake of assonance. Let the navigation serve to navigate by being clear and intuitive. When you find yourself redefining your labels on rollover or on click (ex. the inspire label is further described as “creative services upon clicking) stop and just use the clearer label “creative services.” Let your services be creative, not your navigation labels.
