The situation when I arrived
An agency selling search to law firms, with two problems that were really the same problem. Its own site did not look like it belonged in the category it was pitching against. And its reporting went out the way most agencies' reporting goes out, as an attachment to an email, which means nobody can find last month's, nobody knows whether it was opened, and the agency is the only party who can see the whole picture.
Both are credibility problems. A firm being asked to trust you with its visibility is reading the way you present yourself and the way you account for yourself.
What I folded
- The flagship, rebuilt end to end. Thirty two pages on a hand written theme with no page builder anywhere in it: three practice hubs with twenty seven spokes nested underneath them, so the architecture states the specialism rather than listing it.
- A publishing engine on top of it. Two pieces a day, briefed against a word floor and a link standard, scheduled out weeks ahead rather than written the morning they are due.
- The portal, which is an application and not a folder. Database backed and login gated. Each account sees its own brands and nothing else. Reports, performance charts, a work log of what was actually done, messages, approvals, and a feed for incoming leads.
- Built like something that holds client data. Two factor authentication, scoped access tokens hashed at rest and shown exactly once, scheduled release so a report is not visible before it is finished, versioning, read receipts, and an audit log that records who saw what and when.
- Publishing through the interface, not around it. Reports are released through the portal's own authenticated route, so a report cannot exist on the server without existing in the record. Copying a file into a folder publishes nothing, on purpose.
The numbers behind a login, not behind an email
An attachment can be lost. A record cannot.
What moved
The agency stopped emailing its results and started publishing them. Its clients stopped asking where last month's report went. And the question a client eventually asks every provider, what have you actually been doing, now has a page with a date on it rather than an answer that has to be composed.
What this proves
Reporting you can log into is a different promise from reporting that arrives when someone remembers to send it. Building it is not a marketing job or a design job, it is both plus the part underneath, and the whole reason this brand can offer all three is that it has already had to be all three at once.
Next case, the proving yearThe method behind itAll nine cases
Most agencies report by attachment. It is not laziness, it is that the alternative is an application.
Why the portal exists