Just how customizable is Make & Make Plus?

How marketing agency, Captains of Industry used Make & Make Plus as a foundation for designing and developing their highly customized site.

In the right hands, Make & Make Plus can be the foundation for a truly customized site. Just look at the new website for marketing agency Captains of Industry that used Make & Make Plus to get a jumpstart on development, and create a truly bespoke website for their content marketing agency (and in only a few weeks!).

Captains of Industry works with a variety of organizations—mainly B2B—on the development of their brand and both online and offline content. “Our work helps clients build meaningful relationships with their important customers and stakeholders,” explained Ted Dillon, Managing Producer. “Our content marketing approach pulls the right customers to our clients’ brands and engages them on a deeper level than traditional marketing. We believe that the cornerstone of traditional marketing—the idea of making people want stuff—has become increasingly irrelevant. So the mainstay of our work is just the opposite: make stuff that people want.”

“In the spring of 2015 we decided to do a refresh of our website based on analytics gathered over the previous 12 months. We saw opportunities to consolidate pages and messages, make it easier for potential customers to find the right information, and improve the quality of our web design. Our website is the face of our business, and a declaration of our abilities as a marketing partner. It’s important to Captains that we have a website that’s exceptionally designed, follows clear and provocative UX conventions, is easily editable. This is all in the service of clearly communicating our value and capabilities to prospective clients.”

The team initially read about Make in an article on the recent redesign of Wired.com, which was built on top of Make’s page builder. “Captains is always looking for new technology and platforms that can add depth to our work — in this case, the flexibility to meet the requirements of our page templates and designs. Make Plus offered that.”

“We started with information architecture. We reviewed web analytics and copy and made quick decisions with a small team about what to keep, scrap and adapt.”

At that point, they jumped into designing by prototyping using Make & Make Plus rather than Photoshop. “The Customizer and page-by-page features of Make Plus allowed our designs and code to co-mingle, creating an easy framework to optimize desktop, tablet and mobile designs.”

And then they asked their developer to work some extra magic. “There were a couple places where we wanted to incorporate special functionality that went beyond Make & Make Plus—like an always-mobile navigation and detailed homepage slider. Creating a Make child theme and working within a clear code architecture made that process easy for our developer.”

How has the redesign impacted the brand? “Early feedback shows the clean design and simple architecture has helped more clearly communicate our value and act as a proof point for our capabilities.”

Which is important for a marketing agency like theirs, laser-focused on solving tough communications challenges in unconventional ways. And now, their website reflects their marketing philosophies and messages. “Consumers want tailored information and stories that are deeper than what’s being sold. The most successful marketing provides valuable, entertaining and shareable content that educates, fosters intimacy, and never interrupts. We focus on how we can build relationships prior to and beyond purchases; communicate both value and values; and shape opinions across entire sectors. That’s how we practice content marketing. It’s not for everybody, but we think we’re pretty good at it.”

You can follow the Captains on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

If you’re using Make & Make Plus as the foundation for your site, we’d love to hear about it! Reach out on twitter using the hashtag #iusemake to grab our attention!