And… we’re good to go. We’re live.

Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, we give you the new Barbarian Group website. We have been working on this for, oh, god, who knows? six months? More, I think. I first made the original wireframes about a year ago – back when we quaintly made wireframes in advance of a project. Back before Toby taught us all about agile development and scrum. Back when I thought you made websites by planning in advance. ha. We learned so much during the making of this website, and I’m so proud of it.

Taking six months to make a website is pretty ridiculous, but we were doing several things during that time. building a whole publishing platform. This site has a full, rails-based custom, multi-level blogging platform. Each employee has a blog, and then posts are bubbled-up to the Barbarian Blog, and the most important information is elevated to the Barbarian Homepage. We’ve also introduced a whole topical-taxonomy thing, aggregating content around various topics to give many different windows into our content. Finally, the site is fully integrated into our sales, production and staging systems. Finally, finally, after six years, no more entering the same data into multiple databases. We are now running on a fully-integrated, custom-built project management platform (more on that as the weeks and months go by). We’ve also – finally – gotten our portfolio squared away, so you can see what we’ve been up to for the past year. We’ve gotten some case studies up from our strategy, consulting, technical and planning practices, so the site should now be a lot more representative of the type of work we do these days. Previously we were a full blown marketing R&D company trapped in a production company website.

Our client base has grown considerably, as has the variety of clients we have. We have marketing clients, agency clients, technology clients, media clients. People have totally different perspectives on things, and different proficiencies. We’ve tried to bring something to the table for all of them, from in-depth discussions on things like Processing, Arduino and Ruby on Rails, to high-level discussions on the implications of social media on the marketing landscape. We hope that as time goes on, thousands of individual discussions will bloom, centered around an infinite array of topics. As it is, it took us two months of writing to just get all our past content onto this site and start all the discussions.

The funny thing is, in some ways, the industry caught up to us a bit. When we started, no agencies blogged. Now everyone does. I almost cried when the new Modernista Website came out. So simple, so much less work. Opinion over here, as seemingly everywhere, is divided on the site, but I love it. It shows a fearlessness of the emerging web trends that I find heartening. I’ve noticed most ad agencies take a sort of terrifying tone about the internet: “Yes, these new trends are scary scary scary! But we’ll help you! Don’t be afraid! Well, be afraid unless you hire us!” We’ve always taken a much more enthusiastic tone about it: “The internet is awesome! Don’t be afraid! The water’s fine!” I like that the Modernista! site is unafraid. I must admit I’m a bit jealous of the concept as well, but it never would have worked around here. We build things on the internet. Really hard core things. We’re more than an idea shop, more than a branding shop, we actually have to execute some pretty serious stuff, so our website needs to be representative of that. We’re also a seriously chatty bunch: we like to talk. We’re always talking to each other, so we figured it was time to talk to you as well.

All the Barbarians are furiously writing their first blog posts – I’ve got five or six in the can to get the ball rolling as well. You’ll also notice that the RSS feeds are on every page – pick your level. Add the feed for the homepage if you just want the big product announcements and serious stuff. RSS the blog if you want our musings on everything. Find a specific Barbarian interesting? Add their individual feed. Somewhere, in our upcoming agile dev process, we’ll get a feed for positively everything, but that’ll be a while. We’re not sure how much content we’re making yet, and we want to analyze our traffic for a while and make sure that everything’s kosher.

In the meantime, enjoy. And let us know what you think!