Building a Website (and Trust) With Secure Data Technologies
Owning a business is difficult. Owning your brand identity is even harder—especially as a designer.
For me, nothing is ever good enough. Even when I personally make it.
Do you know how many iterations of the Atomicdust website will never see the light of day? It’s got to be close to 20 by now.
I put my team through hell with new concepts, and I greatly and desperately appreciate their patience with me.
They understand. It’s my baby. I’m the founder. I take it personally.
That is why I could really relate to where our new client, Secure Data Technologies, was coming from when they hired us for a new website.
“We don’t want to look like some basement IT shop,” they told us as we looked at competitors in their space. “Most of these companies, even huge companies, look small-time. We think much, much bigger.”
I could relate to all of it—more than I would ever let them know.
To make matters worse, the last time they’d redesigned their website didn’t go as smoothly as they would have liked, and they weren’t happy with the process or too proud of the results.
They didn’t speak highly of their last agency, and that always bothers me. I hate hearing when people have bad experiences with an agency, and never want to be on the other end of that. I wanted to really nail this one.
But it was going to be tough.
The Secure Data Technologies team had worked hard to successfully grow their company. In the process, they’d gotten used to how things looked. How to explain things. And how to sell. But they’d been burned before—so understandably, there was some hesitation about us coming in with new ideas.
We saw big opportunities. The Secure Data team explained to us how the lion was an important metaphor for them. Lions have long represented the Secure Data culture: Competitive. Brave. Respected. Fast.
Our first challenge was figuring out how to get the client to trust another agency after a bad experience.
The second challenge: how the heck can we use a lion?
Lions and logos and badges, oh my!
During the website design process, I would check in on the progress with the design team.
Everything looked great, leaps beyond the existing website. But no lion.
Secure Data Technologies sitemap
“Where are you going to use the lion photos?” I’d ask.
The question was met with a shrug. Maybe we didn’t have to use it? Maybe we could bury it on a third-tier page? We tried to rationalize our way out of it.
But I knew how much that metaphor means to the Secure Data team, including the founder, and thought of how much elements of the Atomicdust brand mean to me.
“We have to have a lion,” I told them.
A couple days later, the project’s designer, Alex, came up with a great idea. Rather than using literal photos of lions, he created a super-modern, illustrated lion head that we could unabashedly use anywhere—even beyond the website.
It was great. We were all excited about the solution… but would our client go for it?
Big cat country
We were only a few minutes into our homepage presentation with the client, and not a lion in sight. We had no idea how they would react to our new interpretation of the lion—it could go either way. Our team scrolled down to the footer, where the client could see the new lion head for the first time… and it roared.
Well, not literally. But they immediately understood our approach. They saw that we acknowledged their goals and priorities. They listened to our opinions and rationale. We got it, and they got it.
This broke the ice for new ideas and perspectives—perspectives that ultimately led to a great website that everyone could be proud of.
The website: modern, bold and enterprise-level
Reimagined brand elements (the lion, dotted grid patterns, layered images) became our north star, guiding the entire digital experience.
The homepage welcomes visitors with a bold hero section featuring dynamic content that immediately communicates professionalism and technical expertise.
Enterprise-level doesn’t have to mean boring—we created a design system with depth, movement and personality.
Of course, visuals were only one element of the site. The new site needed to drive leads and sales, not just look good. We wrote copy to reflect what audiences care about and structured pages to improve the site’s SEO.
The website’s navigation is streamlined to focus on user journeys rather than internal company structure, improving the experience for visitors.
The result? Visitors can find what they need in as few clicks as possible—a must for busy professionals evaluating IT solutions.
But the back end of the new website is where the real magic happened.
We built the site on WordPress using custom-designed and easily repeatable content blocks, giving the Secure Data team the ability to publish, edit and update pages without needing to call a developer.
Lions and websites and trust, oh my!
In the agency-client relationship, trust isn’t always a given. But when the two teams can collaborate on a foundation of trust, amazing things happen.
I’m proud of the website our team built for Secure Data Technologies, but I’m even happier that we delivered a great experience that restored their faith in marketing agencies.
We had a great time working with Secure Data, and sharing the story of the project, but I have to get back to our own website now—version 21.
