Happy Anniversary, Matrix Group!

Lots happening at Matrix Group these days.  Matrix Group celebrated nine years in business last May 1, 2008, but we didn’t get around to celebrating until a couple of weeks ago.  We also launched a redesign of our Web site last Friday.  The Web site is not quite where we want it to be yet, but check out our website if you want a sneak peak.

Over nine years ago, around May 1, 1999, I started Matrix Group International, Inc.  We’ve come a long way and we have much to be thankful for — amazing staff, loyal and wonderful clients, supportive friends and partners.  The Washington Business Journal says we’re the 6th largest interactive agency in the DC area.  Some days, I feel the weight of the world on me as a small business owner.  But most days, I’m pretty darn happy to be walking off the elevator, saying good morning to as many peopl as I can, and throwing myself into another busy day. 

To celebrate our anniversary, we held a staff party at Continental Lounge in Rosslyn.  It was your typical office party in some ways – open bar and good food – but not in others – the Continental has a purple room, a pool table and a Wii.  We also held a pool tournament.  How very Matrix Group.  James and Patricia won the pool tournament, each winning a purple iPod shuffle.  Check out our Flickr feed for photos from the party.  And stay tuned for a Save the Date announcement for next year’s 10-year anniversary party, which is sure to be a big bash.

We also launched a new Web site last week.  The new site features:

• a completely new navigation system.
• a completely new look and feel, including an updated logo, modified color palette and new branding mini-movies.
• a portfolio section that shows off samples of our work using an interactive interface; if you check out just one section of the new site, check out our portfolio
• all new content.
• related content cross-linked from nearly every page, since every piece of content is categorized.

We have a lot of tweaks and even some content to finish up, but we found ourselves in the situation that many of our clients find themselves in:  the site was almost ready, we had event coming up (in our case, a job fair/open house), but the site was not perfect.  Do we launch or do we wait until everything is perfect?  In our case, we felt the new site was worlds better than the old site, and we didn’t have glaring errors, so we decided to launch.  We didn’t want to miss the opportunity to show off the new site to candidates and the new site is better for SEO (search engine optimization).  We will tweak over the new couple of weeks, then market the heck out of the new site.  It was terrific for the team to have the new site up and just plain exciting for the entire company.

This redesign was a fun and illuminating experience for me because I got to play the role of client in every way.  I changed my mind a lot, I was late on content, and I made the designers change the font size at the last minute.  I’m going to do a seminar on the Matrix Group redesign this Fall, so stay tuned for an announcement.

Last thing: I’m in Costa Rica this week.  I am in an Internet cafe in Guanacaste, on a sloooowwww line.  If you want to follow along in the adventures, you can visit my personal blog at http://jpmkadventures.blogspot.com.  Have a terrific week!