When Your Website Is Getting In Your Way, It's Time

There are few things older than our last website, but one of them is an English proverb dating back to at least the 1500s that is often referenced as “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.” I think most people are familiar with this phrase, and it basically means that when someone practices a trade, they often are too busy making things for others that they tend to neglect themselves. It’s always what I would say when I would send someone to our site and then realize how old it was. 

In other words, we were building websites for everyone else, and not for ourselves. We had our last site for seven years. On the web, seven years is an eternity. But that was okay with us for a while. Since we began in 2012, we have been lucky to have clients we love, and enough of them. People could find our site and use it to get in touch with us, and that was fine. 

What Took You So Long?

Building a website should be much easier for us than it is for our clients. We can build websites in our sleep. We don’t have to run any decisions by outside stakeholders. What took us so long?

Unlike many entrepreneurs, Erin and I didn’t set out to build a company of a particular size. We wanted to help people in forward-thinking nonprofit organizations build better websites, and we didn’t want to work alone; we wanted to learn with and from other experts, to do what we do best and let others shine in their own ways.

We decided to let things evolve, and see what size DevCollab wanted to be. 

When the pandemic hit, we all had our heads down, just trying to get through it. As organizations needed to do more online, DevCollab got busier. We hired more people who share our values and approach problems with their whole brains. 

Next thing we knew, we looked up, and we had what feels like the right size team, and we were focused on improving our internal processes. And with those changes, we realized our 2017 website was hampering our communication, rather than easing it. 

Like most of our clients who come to us for new websites, we’d outgrown our old site. The editing interface had grown clunky without care and feeding.  It wasn’t designed to communicate all the things we need to communicate today. 

Time Keeps On Slipping Into The Future

Each version of our site has been designed by Pixels & Pulp. Our first one was ten years ago, in 2014. We were a group of freelancers back then. I just found it on the Wayback Machine. What an innocent time. 

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10 years ago: the DevCollab homepage, 2014. Hey, it was responsive, even!

Ten years later, here we are. The world feels so very different. We’re grateful to still be here, and to every client and partner–you’re all part of where we are now. So, welcome to our new site! We hope this one’s easier to use. Feel free to send us feedback anytime.