Now that we are a couple of weeks into the year, offering another “Year in Review” doesn’t seem like the best idea or right timing anymore.
While 2024 was challenging — our 2024 Impact Report offers a better look at the year than I can ever provide in this post — I head into 2025 feeling optimistic both personally and professionally
After more than 25 years since founding Plank, I am happy to say I still wake up every morning, looking forward to getting to work. While we had to do some belt-tightening to ride out the first half of 2024, seeing the company’s financial health turn the corner in the fall felt rewarding. On top of that, recent developments in projects and strategy have brought a surge of new activity, giving me plenty to be excited about in the months ahead.
As I think about what 2025 holds for Plank, there are five main themes that will define the year. While predicting the future is never a perfect science, if we focus on investing energy in the following areas, I’m confident we will come out an even better team on the other side.
Collaboration
People imagine website developers as a series of people quietly and singularly working on a project in silence.
Now, while people often have headphones in and are focused, all of our projects are a team effort. Our work needs collaboration and support, be it in person, on Slack or via video conferencing. There are times I am amazed at the volume of messages our team can create if I step away from my desk for an hour. It quickly made me realize our capacity to handle and create a large volume of high-quality work.
I am proud of how our team works with our clients, how much exposure we offer them to see how we work, and how transparent we are. With tools like Slack and Productive, we offer a level of direct collaboration we couldn’t previously. Our goal for this year is to continue to discover new ways that we can be a stronger partner.
While Plank’s purpose is to deliver outstanding websites and applications, our success is based on our people-first focus on our team, clients, partners, and consultants. Over the coming year, we will invest time and effort into all of the different people that make us a strong and growing company.
Innovation
While historically, we’ve seen the success of a website through traditional design expectations, with a more holistic approach to development and content experiences, doing and producing innovative work is a complex endeavour. With our additional focus on ethical development practices, we want to ensure that our work is efficient, modern, and technically of the highest quality possible.
Effective websites do more than display a series of images, texts and videos; they move you through a narrative, and you scroll through a page that tells you a great story. By mixing in the right amount of interactive elements, animation, and motion, a great website can create emotional connections, such as a great film, magazine article, or book. A great website will encourage you to stay and explore, like a great museum, an interesting neighbourhood in a new city or a well-curated local bookshop.
Experimentation
While the quality of our work and the collaborative process we have in place to take care of our clients has been strong for a long time, we spent the last few years working on getting the scope of our work and time invested to match the budgets we’ve agreed to. As a result, the team has worked hard to be efficient, on time, and on budget.
This year, I want to challenge our team to take some of those hours we were able to claw back, and reinvest them into taking some chances. I want them to try new things to make our projects more innovative and push boundaries.
Over the past year, we’ve seen the design team increase their knowledge and skills by developing mini-sites themselves from the ground up, and I’m confident they can challenge themselves even more. I’m happy to see the team try out new technologies and move forward with initiatives around animation and 3D, and I can see how they will influence our work over the next year. I see clearly how a few calculated risks will have a significant impact on our work.
Optimization
When someone thinks of optimization in relation to websites, chances are the thinking starts with file size optimization and ends with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While we are investing in growing our team strength and knowledge in search engine optimization, my thinking right now is more focused on optimization from an organizational level.
As I spend a lot of time thinking about the company holistically, I try to look across all aspects of the organization and see ways to make changes through the lens of experimentation, innovation and collaboration. After 25 years, this company doesn’t need to be reimagined, upended or revamped; it needs to be tweaked and fine-tuned. If we can take it upon ourselves to make 5% improvements every day when we see something we can adjust, I’m confident that we will have a significant impact over an entire year.
On the other hand, I think one of the most interesting opportunities in 2025 is to expand outwards from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and start to also consider the effect of Artificial Intelligence Optimization (AIO). I’m curious what level of control we can offer our projects and clients since it is becoming a crucial way that people will end up interacting with your content and reaching your website.
Excellence
After being impressed by Lindsey Peckham’s presentation, The Magic of Hospitality: Creating Unforgettable Experiences For Our Audiences at Capacity Interactive’s Bootcamp event this past October, I bought a copy of the book that inspired the talk – Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. Finishing it during the holiday break got me thinking about his vision of creating experiences that go far beyond what someone could imagine and expect, and how that could apply to our team. How can we draw inspiration from the world’s best restaurant dining experiences and infuse that level of hospitality into our company?
While our team completely lives up to one of our core values — Empathy — and as a result are constantly working towards doing great work, we can go even further. Excellence is designing beautiful websites and ensuring they are accessible and well-optimized. Excellence is about delivering a content management system and training our clients on how to use and document it well. Excellence is taking extra, unused hours from a project budget and delivering something outside of the scope we know will make all the difference to our clients’ users.
While 2025 may come with its challenges, Plank is in a solid place. We have a great, stable team committed to doing great work. I want to challenge us to go a bit further, try some new things, and generally offer experiences that will impress people just that little bit more.
What is your year looking like in 2025?
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