Before: Web Results Direct
Web Results Direct has been marketing websites since 2001. In digital terms, we’re ancient. We were one of the first SEO agencies in the UK- created before Bing, YouTube, Facebook and even Myspace. And we’d begun to look like it.
Our clients know that what makes us different is our incredible team. We get to understand not only our clients and their business, but them as people. For us, digital marketing starts by first knowing your business as well as you do, so that we can impart that onto users. But our existing brand was too corporate and too impersonal, it didn’t showcase what makes us special. We were just another agency.
Maybe in twenty-five more years our old logo will become vintage chic and we’ll bring it back, but for now we knew it was time for a shake-up.
We set out to create a completely new brand, WRD.
There was a lot to change. A new logo, new colour palette, new documents and biggest of all: a new website.
Out with the old, in with the old
When building our new brand we wanted to make sure we didn’t lose all our rich history in search of the next new shiny thing.
The new brand pays homage to the history of computing which we play a small part in. With influence from the dawn of computing through to the golden age of arcades and into the speculative future of the web, our new brand isn’t afraid to show its roots (and look ahead).
Our new logo, created by Lorraine Snell, also alludes to this with influences in 1970s retro-futurism. Accenting its classic shape with a sharp colour palette and inky blacks only possible of modern screens, this new look blends both our history on the web and our cutting edge techniques.
For our new illustration set we draw influence from the dramatic use of overlapping shapes in mid-century design. This look was popular among graphic designers in the 1950s & 1960s, right in the heart of the birth of modern computing. We take our grid system straight from that same playbook, splitting our site into two distinct columns – and breaking out of that when we need to.
IBM’s Plex Sans and Plex Mono fonts lend us more of that same aesthetic. IBM describes their concept behind the font “as a medium between mankind and machine”. As the bridge between your customers and search engines, we couldn’t think of anything that could suit us more.
But it was important we didn’t become vintage. With Google throwing out new updates all the time, we have to stay attentive and up-to-date.
To shake up the mid-century look, we introduced pixel art and relied on bold colours rather than pastels and browns. We added grain across our imagery to add texture and give us a younger edge.
The website also uses some cutting edge features in the world of CSS, with scroll-driven animations for parallax and stacking slides. It’s the little details that make the user-experience so we’ve aimed to include as many small animations, hidden easter-eggs, and thoughtful details across the site as possible.
Pushing the web forward
Our teams have often struggled to find good quality tools that aren’t locked behind a paywall or covered in ads – so we made them ourselves! Our new SEO tools range from site crawlers to schema generators and they’re designed for professionals, by professionals. We know the need is out there for high-quality tools, so we’ve made them freely available to everyone on the web.
It’s easy for us to get lost in the technical terminology of the modern web. To help our clients understand the finer details of their reports we’ve brought back our digital marketing glossary. We had a similar document a few years ago we included with our reports but we had to drop it after GA4 made it irrelevant. With the dust of that migration settled, we finally picked it back up & reinvigorated it. But why limit it to only our clients? Our glossary is now available to everyone as a one-stop-shop to explain the jargon in SEO & PPC.
Looking to the Future
Our website, like all websites, is an ever-evolving beast. It’s not done! There will always be new features to add (and new high scores to be won) but we’re proud to share this with you now as we get ready to head into 2025.
If you need a digital marketing agency that truly understands your needs and has the history of results to prove it, why not get in touch with our team?
And don’t forget to send your high-score on our new homepage game, Crawlers to highscores@wrd.agency. We’re having a competition in the office at the moment and if a stranger wins it might save me some prize money.
Here’s to 2025!
