Today we launched the new entp.com – and I’d like to walk through some of the design thoughts and methodology we used. First things first: entp.com was designed and built inside the span of ten days (in the midst of client work, too!). We’re a firm believer in doing instead of talking about doing – once we had it in our minds to get started, we worked to make it happen as fast as possible.
The Challenges
Redesigning any agency site is always one of the hardest tasks a designer can take on. Not only do you have the world’s worst client (yourself) – but you’ve got the worst critics (your fellow designers) too. The biggest challenge with ENTP was just exactly how to portray the company, the work, and the people in it.
Typical agencies have life pretty easy – they hire almost exclusively full-time employees, force them to sign over their lives, and then take credit for everything that an employee thinks during their employment. ENTP is a bit different – a large portion of people who work here are contractors, and ENTP allows (promotes!) people to work on their own side-projects. It makes for a very complicated relationship when you try and explain the relationship between something like Archaeopteryx and ENTP. ENTP doesn’t own any rights, but Giles does work here – and I think that’s a credit to the company’s ability. The same can be said for the dozens of plugins and libraries created by ENTP employees. You would struggle to find a single Rails developer who hasn’t used code from an ENTP employee before.
Another hurdle in the way of ENTP is that as individuals each of us are fairly well known in our communities – but as a company few people have ever heard of us. The struggle in designing the site was to reign in all of these disparate ideas and combine them into one solidified ENTP image.
The Approach
At ENTP, we approach design a little differently than everyone else. The design we ended up with was a true collaboration between Justin & myself. We spent a couple of days tossing PSDs back and forth between each other and then threw up a few options to the ENTP Campfire room to make the final decisions. The result is a design that keep a great focus between what we do, what we make, and who we are.
The result is this evolution of the home page:
Simply Static
Hanging out with a group of developers, it’s hard to convince people that sometimes a static lifestyle is the way to go. For simple brochure sites – I still think 100% static is the best method out there. But there are some challenges associated with this – for example, I wanted to pull in people’s github repositories and rotate out employees at the bottom. Luckily for me, Github offers a nice JSON API with callbacks – so I’m able to pull in everyone’s non-forked repositories (thanks to a quick bribe) and show them there. Storing everyone’s information in a nice static json file allows me to work the rest of my magic, all with Javascript. Our deployment strategy is a cron job running a git pull – so anyone with access to the git repository can edit content and push it live.
For simple sites, static is the way to go – don’t be afraid to under-engineer your solution if you need to.
Meet ENTP
Now that we’ve finally got (almost) all of our team up, you can get an idea of who entp really is – you might be surprised to see who’s been working here.
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Our Products
Our Open Source Projects
- astrotrain – simply the best email processing solution out there.
- Seinfeld – automatic tracking of your open source contributions to github projects.
- warehouse – still using subversion? Get the best source browser out there.
- xtt – time tracking built for the add & twitter inclined.
- GitNub – OS X GUI for tracking git logs.
13 Comments
This means you have the rest of the night off for Gears of War 2 right? Since everyone else ditched us for #rubyconf and all that social mumbo jumbo…
Nicely done. The new site has a lot more personality to it. Focusing on the people that make up the company really puts a human face on it all. I just spent the past few minutes refreshing pages, reading about the team, etc. Great redesign.
I really didn’t know about entp.com, nor had I experience the old look, however I think this new look is great bro.
i really like the alternating nav-header. nice work entp.
you guys launching anything soon?
beautiful job guys! a few spelling mistakes though, like the one on http://entp.com/work/ where you the spelled ‘calender about nothing’ link ‘calendar about nohting’
spel chekker, awey!
Thanks for the comments everyone!
jake: I guess I don’t quite follow—this post is about launching something.
the Spell Checker: hate to break it to ya, but it is in fact spelled ‘calendar’
Kyle, I think the Spell Checker was talking about the extra “h” in “Nohthing”. Full phrase as written in http://entp.com/work/ :
“It’s also the code that powers Calendar About Nohthing”
BTW… great job with the site!
I’ll really glad my Uruguayan friends Foca (Nicolás Sanguinetti) and Chainso (Daniel Cadenas) made it to work with you all. Evan is doing it great down here. :)
Thanks oboxodo! (wonderful irony of a typo in a statement pointing out a typo)
Solid work guys, site looks great.
Sharp, real sharp. Great work.
The ENTP business model as eluded to in the Challenges paragraph is intriguing, albeit a bit unclear.
As a fellow small business owner, I’d love to hear more on the specifics of how the company/collective is set up and how the relationships with contractors and employees are structured. It appears that this structure is very progressive, and grants a bunch of freedom to employees. This sounds like a wonderful and fair arrangement. Perhaps an idea for a separate blog post?
And the new site looks awesome, by the way.
As a founder of a couple companies, I’m curious how you structured your company as well. Sounds pretty progressive and I think it could warrant more information if you are so inclined to share.
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