We’re done with writing.
By: Kendra Rainey
Tags: Digital Marketing, No Code, Content Design, Content, Content Strategy

We’ve erased it from our offering as a digital agency. Instead, from today on, Edgar Allan offers Content Design. Here’s why.

Content strategy and content creation are old-school. It’s time for something better.

We’re a small no-code digital agency that does brand strategy, design, web design, development, and content creation. So, why would we ditch the age-old agency standard offering of plain-old “writing?” Because it just doesn’t fit what the web needs today, or drive home the immense value of appropriate, accessible, beautifully informative online content, and we want to be part of the solution.

Here’s a quick overview:‍

1. Thanks to No Code tools like Webflow, building websites isn’t quite as difficult anymore — but building great, useful, intuitive websites still is.

2. Content Design, coined by Sarah Winters, is a process for creating and presenting information in a way that will best suit the needs of the user.

3. We, like so many other agencies, didn’t always succeed at having a designing, writing, and developing process that was user-centered — or that ensured that our designers, writers, and developers were solving the problems of brand, marketing and digital design together.

4. Though we’ve always internally valued Content Design, we’re intentionally highlighting this important service now because we’d like to formalize our desire to put the user, and our teams, first.

5. Consider hiring us for any of your Content Design projects.

Now, for the long-form lovers out there, a bit more explanation.

‍First, we need to talk about what wasn’t working.‍

Though we’re proud of all our work, the process through which we produced that work wasn’t always ideal. Despite our best intentions, strategists, writers, designers, and developers often worked in silos. It’s easy to truly, in your heart of hears value collaboration, but much harder to actually implement it — especially on fast projects with quick turnarounds. “

And as a digital agency deeply invested in No Code, we were noticing a pattern — projects would often stall because content was often fraught with problems. Though we valued it, content creation (and the time and difficult in producing great content) wasn’t always valued by clients, or even well-understood by them in some cases. We needed that to change. ‍

So, we decided to improve the process.

After delving into Content Design (check out our explainer article to get a better idea of what it is), we recognized that our own process didn’t do enough to ensure that all of our amazing team members were collaborating to find the best solutions every time we cracked open a new client project. We’d always valued user-centered design, but like so many other agencies, we lacked a formalized structure for making it happen.

As creatives, we often fall into the trap of thinking that if we have the best people working on a problem, they’ll somehow magically sync up and create the best product — but that’s just not how it works in practice.

If strategists, UX designers, writers, designers, and developers aren’t forced (kindly, lovingly) to put their heads together and talk through their issues and solutions, the final product will either not be as good as it could be or it will be produced more slowly than it could have been. Both of those scenarios are way less than ideal, so ensuring across-the-board collaboration that focuses on the user has become our top priority.

And now we’re announcing it to the world: Content Design at Edgar Allan is here to stay.

Why are we saying this now? We think it’s time. Good, user-centered content is under-appreciated and undervalued, and we’d like to publicly pledge our allegiance to it.

We’ve also been thinking a lot about how we can create a process for ensuring collaboration without physically being together — now an integral part of our work that we never considered before.

It’s official: Edgar Allan is ready to work on your next Content Design project.

We’re ready to solve your content and branding issues through deliberate, meaningful collaboration. To put your users at the center of our process. And to put the best available tools and brains together to work and make something great.

‍Interested in talking about how great content is a bigger part of your web project than you might have thought? Get in touch at hello@edgarallan.com