You can believe that with Salesforce recently celebrating 15 years since it’s first inception, our website has changed year-to-year. To keep up with the changing needs of our customers and prospects, new technologies, new products and so on, we are having to consistently innovate and reflect our corporate and philanthropic values with our website. 

Right around the time of Dreamforce ’14, we changed again and seems some people took notice:

“Everyone has noticed Salesforce.com’s new website, unveiled at its Dreamforce event last week, and logo, which is in line with the new flat and clear-cut design trends popularized by Apple and Windows. Beyond aesthetics, the new layout crystallizes the efforts of the company to communicate that, outside of its core CRM and B2B business, it has cemented its growth into customer analytics, digital marketing and social media.” – Serge Salager for TechCrunch 

Working on the Salesforce1 Platform product section, I had the opportunity to play a part of the launch of the new site and to, tell you the truth, it’s a very exciting time to be working in the Creative Department at Salesforce. The process consists of a lot of iterations, late nights and collaboration. There’s so much energy during this time as we work towards introducing a whole new web experience. Working with the various teams and working with so many talented people allows us to build relationships and learn so much across all the different disciplines. It takes months of brainstorming, planning and building to get to the point of rolling out a new website.

I asked some of our Creative Team members here about their experiences in website redesigns at Salesforce: 

According to Lauren Peters, Design Strategist, you need to take into account the following when freshening up your web presence: you need to think about your primary and secondary audiences, their motivations, the company vision, messaging strategies, branding, touch-points, and so much more. As a Design Strategist, she balances between Developers, Web Managers, UX, Designers, Content Creators and digs into the psychology of the audience.

Joseph Kamel acts as our Redesign Project Team Lead and says he considers branding elements, style guides, mobile responsiveness and if there will be a mobile-first approach in the redesign. He works through scope and timing with the team, identifies and allocates resources according to plan and involves stakeholders from the get-go, keeping them informed throughout the project. 

Joseph describes what it’s like to work with the various teams across our department:

• Digital Strategy (they keep us in line and focused on the task at hand)
• UX (they bring all the thinking that goes into overall site structure, interactions and user flows)
• Design (how creative and conceptual they can be while having a great sense of humor)
• Content Development: Copy-writers, SEO, content strategy (figuring out how all the content pieces come together)
• Development (how creative they can be to come up with solutions that support design)
• Production (they assemble everything, helping us put together missing parts allowing us to see the final product)

In the end, my opinion is that the values we incorporate into our workflow are so important. My advice to you is surround yourself with the right people and processes, be inspired daily and aspire to constantly innovate your brand, your products and customer experiences. Good luck!