The following blog was written by Adam Walker who is “a decorated marketing & advertising professional with 12+ years experience; Walker helps focused businesses creatively develop and fulfill communication strategies through best suited mediums.” The original can be found here.
“I was recently impressed when I came across a bold direction that decorated food service advertising agency, Noble, in Springfield, Missouri took with their new online approach. It was intriguing enough that it caused me to take a closer look, dissect the footprint, and understand the logic.
Their new site stood out because it was void of the traditional slow loading, over-designed, flash intro and mounds of static pages found
on many big agency websites. Instead I found a streamlined, no non-sense pipeline of fresh content set on a clean design aesthetic that was not only interesting, but portable. Check it out: www.noble.net
In what appears to be an effort to expand their digital footprint, Noble went completely Web 2.0 obviously saving the time and exorbitant expense of publishing a big tricky website that would be 5 years obsolete at launch.
Leveraging pre-existing web infrastructure Word Press, Flickr, and Vimeo carry the bulk of the programming load for the site before content is streamed into the Noble widget. Pretty smart considering it puts a flexible focus on generating relevant subject matter to build audience and loyalty.
Just to make sure I wasn’t behind the curve in my observation, I checked Noble’s approach against a small pool of big agency websites that came to mind, and sure enough, looks like they are breaking new ground. Don’t fear though… Click through to the agency’s main blog and you’ll find the standard yet simplified information you’re looking for if your in the market to hire a creative service agency or change a career path; it just happens to be built on the Word Press platform.
The reason this format might be important to consider is that many small businesses and non-profits struggle with maintaining a user friendly online existence at a reasonable price point. Conversely, many large businesses struggle with keeping their sites up to date because their existing online platform is simply antiquated or too rigid to adapt to the speed of business. This footprint might offer all parties an attractive and applicable solution in the future if executed correctly.
While it is not advisable for organizations of either size to attempt pushing a web presence like this live with out professional internal or external help from designers and code wizards. This emerging standard should free up enough budget to create relevant content that takes market share away from their competitors.
Cheers Noble Team! Keep up the great work.”
I must say that I agree wholeheartedly. As part of my effort to promote my “music for advertising” company, I visit a lot of agency sites each day. Yours has an especially clean, quick interaction, and a quality of thoughtful design and focus that few have – that’s very attractive in a noisy online world. I also found the company blog to be insightful.
(And, all of the food is making me hungry!)
However, despite my overall high opinion of what you’ve done, I can’t seem to play any of the (what I assume to be) video examples on your “Our Work” page. I’ve tried three different browsers, pop-ups enabled and disabled, open in-line or in new windows – without success.
In Chrome, a player pop-up emerges, I click the “play” button, a second, blank window emerges, and then both disappear a few seconds later.
In IE, it just hangs in “loading…” status.
Hope this is helpful. Again, congratulations on an otherwise impressive site and content.
Good afternoon Jack,
Thank you for the kind remarks about our site.
I apologize for the inconvenience, but stop by in a few days,
we’ve made a lot of refinements in our portfolio site and it should be running much better. Thanks.
—Dan