Next week our local businesses, restaurants, bars, coffee shops, streets and foothills will be packed full of folks celebrating the awesome startup culture of Boulder. It’s time again for the annual 5-day event: Boulder Startup Week!

We at Viget are psyched to show our support of Boulder Startup Week by hosting an event featuring speakers and insight from the local community. Our event is called Startups + Great UX = Great Success and it’s a topic close to our heart. Besides an enticing alphasymbolic title, we hope the lineup of speakers (see below) will be able to drop some wisdom on ya. Here are the details:

One of my first exposures to Viget several years ago was reading a blog post on the (now) “Flourish” blog. I then found myself following not only the Flourish posts, but the Inspire (design), Extend (development), Engage (marketing), and Advance (UX) posts, even if the topic was outside of my skill set or interest. I found it fascinating that a company would dedicate so much time to sharing their process, insights, and ideas with their community. I ate up what they had to share, which had a lot to do with me eventually seeking a job at Viget.

In the last year we have added a dozen new faces to our team, several of them to our Boulder office. And, since this was our opportunity to celebrate Viget being another year older and a TTT where we were all in one place, it needed to be special.  The whole Boulder team and Doug flew to the East Coast for the week and we all met halfway in Richmond, VA for our Quarterly Progress Meeting.

A few years ago, we established Pointless Corp. here at Viget.

Since Pointless Corp. isn't actually a corporation, by "established" I mean we came up with a fun logo and a basic approach to building our own products that we consider fun and/or useful. We spend almost all of our time at Viget focused on working hard for our awesome clients; but, we find that practicing projects without a client now and then can really help us do better work all of the time.

In March of 2008, we launched the last major redesign of viget.com, and I can say unequivocally it had a huge impact on the success of our business.  Here are three main ways:

1. It highlighted our collective personality.  A company culture happens, but a personality is something to be deliberate about.  What kind of company were we?  We’d been in business for eight years and taken our lumps.  We felt like a brazen teenager, finally comfortable in our own skin, finally confident that we’d figured things out enough to have some swagger.  That site - with a fun design and casual tone - was us coming out of our shell, being proud to be us, and showing everyone who we really were.
2. It connected. 2008 was the emergence of Twitter and Facebook, and events like SXSWi and Refresh felt new and exciting.  There was a community forging locally and nationally for our industry, and our site was the center of our connection to that community.  We weren’t an old entrenched agency, but we weren’t the wide-eyed newbies either.  People responded.
3. It wasn’t all about us. We launched four niche blogs, each one written for our peers in the major roles we have at Viget (UX, design, development, and marketing).  We didn’t over think it.  We just shared stuff that we thought was relevant.  Problems we’d faced, tools we’d used, ideas we'd discussed, stuff we'd made, approaches we’d tried.  It was truly a conversation.  Looking back, I'm amazed at the result. Every person we've hired since that launch has referenced the blogs as important to either finding us or getting to know us before joining.  A number of our clients -- including major brands like Choice Hotels and PUMA -- found us first via a blog post that helped them solve a problem.

Today, we've launched another new version of viget.com.