Social media, SEO, marketing and writingThe Most Innovative Companies in Design (Ranked by WebsiteGrader Score)
Recently, I wrote a blog post titled, “Which SEO Agencies Practice What They Preach?” The article generated a lot of comments from professionals within the creative agency world–most of them lukewarm. Respondents fell into two camps: 1) Those who disagreed with the methodology of utilizing a free site grading service to evaluate and compare SEO companies, 2) Those who were embarrassed by the results. After rereading my post, I not only stand by my words, but I have decided to expand the concept of comparing leading class companies by WebsiteGrader Score into a regular feature on my blog.
Why compare firms by WebsiteGrader Score? Because looking under the hood can tell you a lot about what companies are doing to promote their brands–both on site and off site.
So which category would I zero in on next? Well, it didn’t take me long to decide. I stumbled across an interesting article by Linda Tischler published on FastCompany.com on Feb 11, 2009 titled, “The Fast Company 50: The Most Innovative Companies in Design” that purported to profile extraordinary design enterprises across the nation, part of a larger article looking at firms across various industries.
Prepping the List to Grade
I had only heard of two of the design companies profiled by Fast Company, so I looked up each company on Google and verified the corporate URL for each firm. Then went to Websitegrader.com and evaluated each site.
Here are the top 10 design firms ranked by Fast Company along with their WSG score:
- Ideo 98.3
- Marcel Wanders Studio 71.0
- Rockwell Group 77.0
- Pentagram 97.3
- Whipsaw 53.0
- Ammunition 71.0
- Frog design 95.0
- Fuseproject 88.0
- Smart Design 93.0
- NewDealDesign 59.0
Big Ah-Ha’s
Ideo had the highest WebsiteGrader score and they were also ranked #1 design firm by Fast Company. That’s a fairly compelling confirmation that this firm is as good as they appear to be. Pentagram, Frog Design and Smart Design each scored above 90%, so my takeaway is that they each made a respectable showing and deserve some props.
Most of the other firms on the list scored lower than I would have expected. These are not big dumb brands…these are cutting-edge design companies. It just doesn’t seem acceptable that any of the firms on this list score below ninety percent, yet 6 out of 10 did!
The two design firms that scored that lowest were Whipsaw and NewDealDesign. Yes, it’s true both sites were built using Flash. But in 2009, there are plenty of ways to optimize a Flash website in a way that makes them accessible to humans, search engines, and social media sites. These two firms, for whatever reason, chose not to put the extra effort in to make their online content and code up to par. Tsk, tsk.
Digging under the hood at NewDealDesign.com, you will see that basic SEO best practices were not performed at all. According to WebsiteGrader, meta descriptions and keywords were missing from the NewDealDesign website. Images on the site were missing ALT text. There were a surprisingly low number of pages indexed by Yahoo: 26. One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. The more links the better. NewDealDesign had only 577 inbound links, and the domain is 9 years and 9 months old. One would surmise that a leading design firm would have many, many more inbound links. No blog, no RSS feeds and no contact forms were detected on the site either.
In Conclusion: There May Be A ‘Return On Awesomeness’ After All
To be fair, NewDealDesign appears to be an offline design firm (packaged goods, industrial design, etc.) and doesn’t appear to offer web strategy & design services. Their client list is impressive: Puma, Samsung, Microsoft, Epson, Dell, HP, Kensington, Nokia, Logitech, SAP, Sun, Toshiba, Verison, and more.
But some of other design firms included on The Fast Company Most Innovative Companies list appear to do a fair amount of web strategy & design work. It seems fair to expect a design company’s website and online brand strategy to be deployed professionally and thoroughly. It surprises me when this is not the case–and the Fast Company list of innovative design firms did not disappoint.
So while many of the design firms profiled in this post failed the ‘practice what you preach’ smell test, they appear to be lauded by the press for their exceptional creative abilities nonetheless. And the fact that they are being hired by the world’s top brands to transform the ordinary into extrordinary–through design–may be proof positive that generating a ‘return on awesomeness’ is possible after all.
