Creative agency website design has an odd problem. The people you're trying to win over look at great work all day, so a template with your logo dropped in reads as a warning sign. Your site is the first piece of your portfolio a prospect sees. If it's slow or generic, they'll assume your work is too.
We recently built one for Hello Apollo, an art, culture and creative studio working out of San Diego, Seattle and New York. Their work is film and photography, so the site had one job: get out of the way and let the work sell. Here's what we think a great creative agency website needs, and what each piece looked like for them.
A creative agency website is built around the work, not a template
Most agency sites start with a theme and then cram the work into it. That's backwards. The structure should come from what you actually make: the films, the shoots, the campaigns, and the context behind each one.
We built Hello Apollo's site from the ground up around the content their team produces. Each project gets its own section, with a film across the top and a spread of stills from the shoot underneath, so a visitor sees the range of the work, not one hero shot and a caption. It's a creative portfolio website first and a company site second.
A single page website can still be fast
A lot of the best creative agency websites run on one long page. That suits a studio well: one scroll, the whole story, no hunting through menus. The catch is that a page full of video gets heavy in a hurry, and a video production company website that stutters on a phone undercuts its own pitch.
Here's how we kept Hello Apollo's page light:
- A video hero with a still image behind it. The still shows first, so the page never sits on a black box while the video loads. Phones get a portrait cut of the video sized for the screen, and anyone who's turned off motion on their device just sees the still.
- Films that wait their turn. None of the project films download when the page opens. Each one starts loading as you scroll close to it, plays muted while it's on screen, and pauses once you move past. Sound is one tap away.
- Photos sized for the screen. Phones get smaller versions of the big images, so nobody pulls down a desktop-size photo on a cell connection.
The result: 99 on phones and 100 on desktop in Google's PageSpeed test, and 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO.
Great creative agency website design is ready for search on launch day
Plenty of studios launch a beautiful site that Google can barely read. There's no page title worth clicking, no description, and a blank preview when someone texts the link.
Hello Apollo's site went live with all of it in place: a real page title and description, share cards so the link shows their logo when it's posted or texted, a clean sitemap, and Search Console set up so we can see how Google reads the site from day one. Every image on the page has a written description too, which helps both search and anyone using a screen reader.
It tracks leads the way agency clients actually reach out
Agency work rarely starts with a contact form. A brand manager or producer sees the work, then emails the studio directly. If your analytics only count form fills, you can't see the one step that actually matters.
So we set up Google Analytics on Hello Apollo's site with clicks on their contact email counted as leads. That's how their clients reach out, so that's what gets measured.
What this looks like put together
You can see the whole thing at helloapollocreative.com: one page, their films and photos front and center, fast on any screen.
None of this is only for creative studios. Any service business that sells its expertise lives or dies on how that expertise shows up online, whether it's a film reel, a portfolio of projects or a long track record. We design and build sites that put the work first and make sure they're fast, findable and measured from launch. You can see the pricing here.
Ready to see where your site stands? Get a Free Website Audit, a 65-point scan of your site and your Google presence, and we'll show you exactly what to fix first.