Introducing our new website

There’s something slightly embarrassing about being a creative marketing agency that designs and builds websites every day… while quietly ignoring your own for years.

After plenty of conversations, ideas, designs, development, tinkering, changing our minds, changing them back again and the inevitable “while we’re at it…” additions, the new Halt website is officially live.

And it was definitely time.

Our website has always punched well above its weight commercially. More than two-thirds of all inbound enquiries into Halt come through it, with our SEO optimisation capabilities playing a huge part in making that happen.

It generates leads, it starts conversations and it introduces people to Halt, which ultimately generates revenue. So naturally, we spent the best part of four years giving everybody else’s websites our love and attention instead.

Back to our roots

When we started talking about what the next version of Halt should look like, we didn’t want to reinvent the brand for the sake of it.

In fact, we wanted to do the opposite, we wanted to go back to our roots.

The Halt brand was originally created around a deliberately simple black-and-white identity, using one of the most universally recognised typefaces in the world (Arial/Helvetica) across our logo mark and typography.

No complicated brand system, no enormous palette of agency colours and no trying too hard to look like a creative agency.

Just black, white and plenty of space, because we’ve always believed the colour associated with Halt should come from the work we create for our customers.

Their brands, their websites, their campaigns, their content, their people and their successes. So the new website gives all of that work a much cleaner canvas on which to live.

Light side or dark side?

One of our favourite details is also one of the simplest.

Visitors can choose whether they experience the website in Light or Dark mode. It’s a relatively small feature, but it represents a much bigger part of how we approached the project.

We didn’t just want to build something that looked good in a portfolio screenshot, we wanted to create an enjoyable digital experience that people could interact with and explore in the way they prefer.

There are lots of those little details throughout the site, movement, transitions, scrolling content, interactive elements and subtle surprises, all designed to give the site some personality without getting in the way of what somebody actually came to find.

Because we believe that clever UX isn’t about making people work harder to understand your website.

So… what’s actually on it?

The new Halt website has been completely restructured around the questions people usually have when they discover us:

Who are you?

What do you actually do?

Do you understand recruitment businesses like ours?

Can we see some examples?

And most crucially, are you any good?

Our expanded Services area now gives visitors a much clearer picture of how we can help, covering Branding, Creative, Content Writing, Email Campaigns, Marketing Resource, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, SEO and Virtual CMO. 

We’ve also introduced dedicated Expertise areas for recruitment agencies, Talent Solutions businesses, Start-ups, In-house Talent Acquisition teams and organisations in other sectors.

That’s important because Halt today works with a much broader range of businesses than it did when our previous site was launched. We wanted people to be able to quickly find the part of Halt that’s most relevant to them rather than having to work it out for themselves.

The bit we’re most proud of

Naturally, we’ve made considerably more room to show off work too good not to be proud of.

Our Work section brings together projects and case studies spanning branding, websites, strategy, social media, SEO, marketing resource and more, showcasing the creative output alongside the thinking, challenges, impact and results behind it.

That’s probably the biggest change in philosophy from our previous website.

We can write thousands of words telling people we’re creative, experienced or good at what we do, but the proof is in the pudding, so we need to put that front and centre of everything the site now does.

The site now gives us a much better platform to showcase the variety of businesses we’ve been lucky enough to work alongside, from ambitious recruitment start-ups through to established global talent businesses and some incredibly recognisable employer brands.

Meet the Halteregos

The new site also puts much more emphasis on the people behind the work.

Halt isn’t a mysterious collection of laptops and Adobe licences. Our Halteregos bring decades of combined recruitment marketing experience across strategy, branding, design, websites, content, social media, SEO and everything in between, and the new Team section gives visitors a better opportunity to meet the people they’ll actually be working with.

We’ve also expanded the Journal, where we’ll continue sharing ideas, industry updates, opinions, advice and the occasional marketing rant about the things happening across recruitment, branding, websites, SEO, content and marketing more broadly.

And yes, there is a section in the navigation called “WTF!“, you’ll have to explore that one yourself.

Designed for people and built for search.

Behind all the creative bits, there was another part of the project we couldn’t afford to get wrong.

Our own website is probably the strongest evidence we have for the commercial value of SEO.

When a majority of your inbound enquiries are generated through your website, ripping everything up and starting again isn’t particularly sensible.

So while the front end has been completely rethought, we’ve been equally focused on what sits beneath it, protecting the organic visibility we’ve built while creating a stronger platform for where search is heading next.

That includes traditional Google search, but increasingly it also means thinking about AI search, GEO and how businesses, expertise and content are discovered and understood by generative platforms.

It’s an area we’re investing heavily in for our customers, so it would be slightly awkward if we’d forgotten to do it for ourselves.

A website that feels like Halt

For us, that’s probably the thing we’re the happiest about. It’s simple without being boring, it’s creative without being complicated, and confident enough to let our customers and our work take centre stage.

Founder and Managing Director Chris Cranshaw said:

“There’s a certain irony in spending every week telling recruitment businesses how important their website is while leaving our own largely untouched for nearly four years.

Thankfully, the old site continued to work incredibly hard for us, generating a lot our inbound enquiries, but the business had evolved significantly and the website simply hadn’t evolved with it.

I wanted the new site to feel like the Halt we originally set out to create. Black and white, simple typography, a healthy dose of personality and a platform where our customers and our work provide the colour.

But underneath that simplicity there’s a huge amount going on. From the Light and Dark experiences and interactive details through to the way we’ve structured our services, expertise, work and content, everything has been considered around making Halt easier, and hopefully more enjoyable to explore.

Most importantly, it gives our team a platform that properly showcases the quality of what they create every day. I’m incredibly proud of it.”

 

A massive thank you to our Halteregos

A huge thank you to everyone at Halt who has played a part in bringing it to life.

Anyone who has ever launched their own website will know that being your own client is… interesting.

There are always more ideas, always another page you could create, always another animation you could tweak, and always somebody saying, “I’ve just spotted one tiny thing…”

A huge amount of thinking, design, development, copywriting, content, imagery, SEO, testing and general Halt obsessiveness has gone into getting it here.

So, after nearly four years, our own website has finally received some of the attention we’ve been busy giving everyone else’s.

Have a wander around, switch the lights on and off, meet our Halteregos, explore the work, read our Journal and discover more about what we do.