You may have noticed that a few weeks ago our site has completely changed. New structure, new content, new experience in general. In this article, we explain to you how and why we decided it was time to 'freshen up' 💥
Why a Redesign? Why now?
CloudFire has faced many evolutions in recent years: in methods, in tools and more generally in the approach with which we internally face the challenges of everyday life. We realized that all these developments, obvious to us who experience them every day, were no longer clearly communicated on our website. The brand identity that this expressed did not reflect our evolution and still seemed to be what it was two years ago.
The push behind the Redesign
Driven by the desire to communicate our new approach, we jumped at the ball by taking advantage of a major reorganizational step in our offer: moving from independent and not very interconnected services to a deeply integrated product ecosystem and ready to climb exponentially.
In addition to this, we also needed to evolve the site from the point of view of usability and its organization. We wanted a more lively and vibrant site, richer in content but still well actionable and visually satisfying, aligned with our Value proposition.
Strategy is the heart of the process
An activity like this is complex and full of details and, having never had direct experience in this, a great challenge awaited us. Furthermore, a redesign of this type cannot be an end in itself, but rather represents the starting point of a complete CloudFire rebrand, consistent in all its forms and iterations.
What did we do then? We have researched ourselves, we have studied and organized a strategy with only a few strong and immovable points. Everything else had to remain totally flexible, since we were certain that we could not predict every possible case or aspect that we would encounter once we had really put our hands in the dough in the project.
- The communication Of the contents must be Chiara and concrete. To convey our value and often complex concepts in an understandable way, we must speak effectively to our target;
- The navigation It must be uncomplicated Ed intuitive. To allow users to access and move quickly between contents, a new menu and a new footer are needed, with a larger network of connections;
- The structure of pages It must be dynamic but not chaotic. At CloudFire we don't like rigidity, we want a dynamic site with a flexible structure that maintains a clear and orderly display of content on any device.
- The User Interface (UI) must express our continuous evolution. The adoption of a new style and an asset library that is fresher and more consistent with our evolution confirms once again our innovative nature and improves the user experience.
Value is in the journey, not only in the results
We set to work with enthusiasm, although aware that we are facing a very intense period, given the significant amount of work expected (spoiler: we obviously underestimated it 🫣 ). The first step was to think about the structure of the site, the order of the pages and the organization of the contents in a logical way. Then we created the common and most important elements, defining the guidelines for the style to be applied to the components.
When the ideas became clear enough, we developed the first POC of a complete product page, to concretely evaluate the effectiveness of our proposals. This was then followed by the other pages, alternating Products, Solutions, Resources and Why CloudFire based on the ready content and the creation of the graphics.
Finally, it was time for optimizations, to enter the animations, say rReview the contents, to maximize the value of On-page SEO and dozens of other activities without which the project could not be said to have been completed.
Let's be honest: throughout this process, we have constantly made mistakes and tried again, even where we thought we had clear ideas. We have changed contents, deleted and recreated pages, even created ten iterations of the same component and rethought some things from scratch when we thought we had finished them.
We repeated this process until we were completely happy with the final product. We realized that every mistake was not only an end in itself, but it allowed us to evolve: without these we would never have achieved a result of this level.
Next Step: Rebrand CloudFire
The redesign of our site is only the first step in our rebrand journey. The strategy we have defined will accompany us at least until the end of this year, leading us to touch one by one all the elements that make up the CloudFire 🎯 brand
The first one? Cortex, you may have already seen some changes in recent weeks, however in the coming months there will be other interesting news!
You know, you have to wait for good things, but we promise you that you won't have to do it long! 🚀
Stay tuned!
