The Creative Department

Founded in 1992, the Creative Department is an independently-owned advertising agency based in the historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio.

The Challenge

Looking to improve its presence online and raise inbound calls from prospective clients and employees, the Agency wanted to
redesign their site to be more search engine friendly, move the site to a content management system (CMS), and start blogging all without losing the fun of their previous website.

The Solution

We settled on the open source framework, Drupal, as our CMS, and began creating a look and feel around the mantra, “Good. Clean. Fun.” Leveraging the website design, I set up our blog on WordPress to encourage widespread adoption among employees. We settled on 5 keyword phrases to optimize for and wrote all site content to incorporate these keywords into the “clean” theme.

As a result, creativedepartment.com ranks in the top 5 on Google for all the search terms. Site traffic and inbound calls are up over 200% from when we launched the redesign. And the blog? It has repeatedly been recognized as one of the most engaging and influential blogs in advertising and was selected as the #1 blog in Marketing, Advertising, and Branding in 2009 by PostRank.

What I Did

I was responsible for concepting the site’s functionality and user experience, crafting all site messaging and content, and creating, managing, and writing for the award-winning blog.

Credits

Copywriter: Sean Biehle
Art Director: Brandon Blank
Art Director: Jeff Lay
Web Developer: Taylor MacDonald
Web Developer: Robb Hedrick

Gallery

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