The bad news: Yes, it took far too long to get here.
The good news: Day one, new platform and a ton of ideas to come to life soon.
Q: Dear Amnesia, most other agencies have sexy 100% flash based websites, so where’s yours gone?!!
So here’s the the thinking; times have changed and we decided we needed something much bigger than just a pretty front end. In a modern digital world ‘content’ has incredible value – for us that would be the things that inspire us, the work we do, the ability to talk about changes to the digital landscape, our people and the social space. In our site you’ll find over 1200 articles written by our staff over the last three years. This content deserves more of the stage because we think that says more about us than pretty flash animations and clichéd marketing taglines. Today it’s more about being authentic and transparent so we wanted to bring the social age to the site,and share the things we do together in a more open format. We want the work to do the talking (as much as possible), we want to listen to what people have to say about us. We also wanted our site to work well with Search because discoverability is an important part of any website. We also want to experiment and we now have a site that lets us do a lot more things a lot more quickly. For us, the old ‘flash-only’ animated website just wasn’t the right way to do all this.
Q: You’ve fused a blog, social and interactive content together. How was this site built?
To start with let’s talk about the framework of the site. We’ve built it using one of the worlds leading open source blog platforms; Wordpress. Essentially everything you see on this site is ‘part-blog’. Blogs are great for lots of things – they are off-the-shelf content management systems, they are SEO monsters, they are flexible to develop in, they are open source with tens of thousands of developers making it better every day. Importantly we felt building our website this way would be a springboard for us learning how to do very cool things in blogs and social – hopefully we’ll start to unleash some of the potential of doing it this way as time goes by.
You’ll notice that we’ve included some interactive flash layers in the form of animated a-feature and also an interactive game on the right hand side. We’ve built some widgets that feed in social content
Q: What about all the Social Media stuff in the site?
Social media is evolving and maturing but it isn’t new and it’s certainly not new to us. We were the first Australian agency to put social front and centre of our business by doing things like listing our staff on Twitter and blog publicly and letting their voices become part of our brand. Although we have had a dedicated social team for several years we believe that every single member of staff is part of our social team. This site is designed to further extend their knowledge and voice – you can talk to us or comment in our Site, Blog, Twitter,Flickr or Facebook. Before you ask, yes we do have guidelines and you can read them here: http://www.razorfish.com/img/content/RazorfishSIMguideWebJuly2009.pdf
Q: What’s with that strange game on the homepage?
Games offer a lot of value to a 24/7 digital strategy. They are serious marketing tools, often misunderstood and underestimated. In a few months time we will present some stats on what the game has done for our site. In the meantime why not read our opinion and some stats on online games here. Alternatively just go get a high score and beat your mates.
Q: Why so long to build the site?
The first wireframe for this site (pretty much the thing we have up there today) was drawn about 20 months ago. Unfortunately we’ve had too much work on ever since so it’s been real slow going. In real terms it has taken about 14 weeks and even though there are some elements that are less original than they would have been had we launched sooner this is a site we can build onto over the coming months unlike Flash sites that stay the same for a long time. We’re confident we can do pretty much anything we want going forward – and that’s the real idea: A site that can roll with the digital waves as they roll in.
Q: Can I leave feedback or ideas?
Yes please. 
