THE EMERGENCY 1% INVOKED

 

Every six-to-eight months, we find ourselves, like Sisyphus, devolving into an endless cycle here at Maverick PR.   It’s a process, if you want to call it that, but a process that rarely produces a result or a conclusion.  It’s like a semi-annual bloodsport during which the partners brainstorm and argue; we criticize, degrade and humiliate one another; we snipe like teenagers and fight voraciously; and we lay out passive aggressive statements so heavy with negative subtext that it would make grown men weep.

Yes, all this in an ongoing “discussion” about the more mundane details of running a small business:  things like logo design, business card creation, and yes, the design of our beloved Web site.

Now please understand — we’re a PR agency – our web site doesn’t need to be especially robust.  We don’t need lots of exceptional features and we DEFINITELY refuse to use stock photos.  Ahem… some of you.  All our little online presence needs to do is help potential clients find and learn more about us, and, in many cases, provide information about what our clients are up to.  We do have some additional higher, more long-term hopes than that, but really, that is essentially it.

How We Got An All-New MavPR Web Site

Why is this so hard?  Well, we are pretty lean and mean here — we don’t have an internal (or external!) Web team, or designers of any kind.  It’s all on us.  Despite this, we’ve still managed over the years to maintain our site and have really had some great success with it. DESIGN-wise though, every iteration, while better than the previous, has still been mildly behind the times.

Thus, we constantly argue about refreshing.  Redesigning.  We debate themes and layouts and new functionality and the overall purpose.  We debate adding editorial content and PR industry trends and personal commentary and more.  And in the end, since we are equal partners in this mad agency, we end up smashing heads right in the middle, eventually drawing a stalemate and tabling the issue.

Well not this time.

NO.

This time the proverbial foot was put down.

This time the legendary and long-hidden clause in our founding contract was invoked:

THE EMERGENCY 1% VOTE.

 

That’s right.  In times of crisis or severe frustration, we are able to — as the ultimate last resort — call on an emergency bonus 1% voting power, thus enabling a winning vote to be cast, 51% to 50%.  The injustice is sweetly just.

This redesigned web site is one of the first (well… the first we’ll talk about publicly) 101% vote-getter.

And so what you see today is a full redesign in layout, with an emphasis on bigger, sharper images of our clients’ amazing work, more prominent and meaningful news stories, and additional tweaks that in the future will help us work with both clients and media in a more efficient way.  We’re looking to add more functionality over the next few weeks to make things even better, our content stronger, our media more engaged and better managed, and our clients happier.

So thanks for dropping in to check out the redesign.  Until next time, we shall continue our dangerous dance.

 

And remember, if you’re not having fun creating arcane rules for your small business, you’re doing it wrong.