In case you haven’t noticed, emotion studios has just moved into a brand new, shiny website.

Here’s the thing though about creating a new company website: No matter how prepared you believe you are, launching a new site can be a pretty big and cumbersome task. Even with an amazing development team, and Word Press getting easier and easier to use. Because launching a new website, much like moving, is a project that is guaranteed to take up way more time and energy than expected.

We realize this sounds like the ultimate #firstworld problem. But it’s difficult to change the rhythms of a collective workday and shift team focus. We are our patterns after all and managing the build of a new website together is a strange, skinny little muscle that doesn’t get worked out very much at all.

But now that we’re close to finally being done (we just have to rearrange some furniture – to keep with the moving in metaphor), there’s this cool thing that happened while struggling as a group to upgrade the website: we got the chance to sort of go back and start over as a company. To reconnect with the core values, beautiful co-workers, incredible clients, and the amazing community that makes up emotion studios.

For a moment, we get to be new again.

Because, by diving into the user experience, choosing a tag-line, deciding which stories we’re going to tell, how to optimize for search engines, creating a content calendar, finding the videos and images to use, and how to highlight employees and clients, there’s this cool opportunity to go back and look at the essence. To ask questions, make detailed decisions, collaborate, decide what works and what doesn’t, fight a little bit about what we believe to be important, narrow down (again) what our value and mission statement is, and much more. And that turns out to be a pretty valuable exercise for continued evolution as a company.

Not to mention, we got to work with a world-class development team at Avista who went above and beyond to make sure we are happy with the final product. Avista is simply an inspiration to people doing client-services everywhere.

So what was, at times, a pretty painful process of edits, details, project management, and time away from the normal activities of a creative visual storytelling agency (whatever ‘normal’ is), turns out to be a pretty great way to build team and prepare for the next evolution of emotion studios.

Next up: a new version of our demo reel. Can’t wait!

We’d love to know your thoughts on building a company website, what you think about our new site, and any other insights you have about the subject in comments below.