Three things we put on our website (after building hundreds for everyone else)

We have been lucky enough to have designed and built, literally, hundreds of websites, digital experiences, ecomm, internal tools, applications, and more. Which is the reason why it took over two years to get our site redesigned.

It’s crazy to stop and think what we’ve accomplished over the last six years. We’ve been so deep in the woods working on amazing projects that our site ended up in the “we’ll get to it” camp. But, we finally did it!

And while we were at it, we took all of the stuff we’ve learned over the years, the good, the bad, and the buggy, and applied some of it to our own site because, if it’s good for our clients, it’s great for us. So here are three of my favorite (and very useful) features that made it out of the “post-mvp” sprints and into our ship bucket.

1. Keyboard shortcuts, because we’re all power users now

I’ve personally been huge on keyboard shortcuts, and I’m lucky enough to have surrounded myself with others who love them too. And it’s natural because we live in software daily, from managing our email to managing our tasks. I personally use and love Superhuman for managing email. One of my favorite features is their command palette, you guessed it ⌘+ K. It opens up a world of shortcuts, commands, and snippets, all aimed at making my life easier when going through email. It’s basically second nature to me. So much so, that I barely take my hands off of my keyboard… unless I’m swiping a crumb off my desk. It happens, I’m human.

So why not use it for ourselves? You’re reading this on our site right now, just try it, ⌘ + K or Ctrl + K, and just type. Great things to try are “clients”, “work”, “ecomm”. And if really want to be a scale.agency power user (who wouldn’t want to?), you can just use direct shortcuts like C for clients and W for work. It’s super nerdy, I know, but also kinda awesome.

We’ve used this thinking in client work too—especially in web apps where speed matters (shoutout to the Consero project). Power users appreciate stuff like this. It’s small, but it adds up. And honestly, once you get used to it, it feels like time travel.

2. Tag-based navigation

This one builds on the concepts of the keyboard shortcut above. Since we knew we were inviting people to use their keyboards more, we also knew they needed to quickly find what they were looking for. And rather than go all in on a fancy Algolia setup out of the gate (though we love Algolia, no hate), we decided to keep it simple.

We added a lightweight tagging system. When you open up the menu, you’ll see the shortcuts at the right of some of our key pages, but you’ll also see a number of tags on the work. Our idea was straightforward, our users may or may not know what they are looking for, they may want to search for an industry, or a practice, or a client name. Who knows! So, for our work, we added taxonomy that would allow this to happen again quickly.

For example, you could type: real estate, and land on either Osprey Bay or Lincoln Property Companies, but you could also type ux and see both projects too.

Could be a blog post. Could be a case study. Could be a capabilities page. The point is: we’re not making you dig.

It’s not rocket science, but it works. And we’re improving it constantly. More tags, more relevance, more speed. It’s like adding cheat codes to your own site.

3. A clean, UX-first experience

This might sound obvious, but it wasn’t to us, at least at first.

A lot of sites these days are over-designed. Too many animations. Too many colors fighting for attention. Too many “look at me” moments when all the user wants is clarity. We didn’t want that. Not for us. Just to be clear, there’s a time and place for what I call wizz-bang. And honestly, a lot of agencies need that in order to stand out. But when everyone else is going that direction, why not choose a different path?

So we went minimal. Not boring—just intentional. We focused hard on UX and content clarity. We made sure the work stands out. That pages read easy. That buttons feel good to click (yes, that’s a real thing).

We still care about aesthetics, obviously. We’re a design-driven team. But we didn’t let visuals get in the way of the experience. The goal was to make things feel effortless. If you notice how slick the site is, great. But even better if you don’t notice and just find what you need in 2 clicks or less.

Yes, it’s risky. Yes, some potential clients will not be impressed. That’s totally ok with us. We’re super clear on the fact that we’re not for everyone. But for those who we are a good fit for, we’ll rock the 💩 of out it.

Bonus: Light and dark modes

Is this revolutionary? No. But is it thoughtful? Absolutely.

A bunch of our users visit our site at night. We saw it in the analytics. So rather than force retina-searing brightness on them, we gave them a choice. The site defaults to whatever your system is set to—light or dark—and you can toggle it any time.

It’s a little thing. But little things make the difference between okay and wow, someone actually thought this through. And those are our favorite ways to delight our users.