About a year ago we decided to launch the first version of our company site http://www.dreamstarcash.com. Up until then we’d never really had any major requirement for a site, all hires were local, and most of our business relationships were handled over ICQ or skype.

2010 was a busy year. In July we moved into our new offices and over the course of the year we doubled the number of members in our team. Collaboration tools were becoming increasingly important so we decided to migrate to Google Apps for Business

As part of this process we needed a domain to run all the new emails under, up until that moment most people were using the @fux.com for there emails on an internal mail server. We were increasingly moving into more mainstream circles, attending SEO conferences, Agile Development seminars and a bunch of other events. It was at this stage it became apparent that it would be useful to use a more mainstream-friendly branding for ourselves as a lot of the talent we were hoping to tap into was to be found there.

For that reason we setup our shiny new instance of Google Apps on the @dreamstarcash.com domain – that left us with a bit of a problem though, at the time it was redirecting to an affiliate program.

It was at that point we realised that no one really knew what we were about and that we had nowhere to share it, so….time for our first company site!

 The main goal of this first site was to (hopefully) impress potential new candidates by allowing us to showcase our brand new shiny office, life @ dreamstar, our out of office activities organised twice a year, our projects, etc.

AMA on reddit

The first site worked really well, in fact a while back we did an AMA on reddit that was a huge success, we got just over 17K visits a day, a record we doubt will be broken any time soon… Thanks redditors!

I run PornTube.com & 4Tube.com (among others) – AMA!! (self.IAmA)

Although this first site served well for the first year it was lacking in certain areas. We couldn´t easily publish any news, projects or job offers and also we felt the styling was just a little too out there.

Wishlist v2!

Given our commitment to Agile we were able to recognise that it was time for the next iteration.

As Product Owner for the project I asked around and we compiled a shortlist of objectives for the new site:

• Appeal to potential candidates by showcasing our company culture, our workspace and our achievements (in that order)
• Increase transparency: Allow potential business partners to better understand who we are, our beliefs and ethics, etc. (Historically this has not been the case for many adult related companies).
• Create a platform where we could publish content that would appear to a wider audience.

Here was some of the stuff we decided we’d like for v2:

• Ability to publish blog posts
• Ability to upload new job listings
• Styling more in line with our company branding/logo
• Easily create new photo galleries
• …

All of this had to be done with a cleaner styling while not losing that “fun factor” that we’re so proud of, although our sites handle over 3,5 Million visitors/day we are still a startup at heart! 

So we handed over the challenge to @pablodeeleman our UX/UI specialist – and this is the result, we hope you enjoy!