It’s hard to think of a more fitting day than Labor Day to officially announce the launch of our new website. We live in an era when many types of services are becoming automated, and some people are even attempting to market investigative services through an app. When we were considering a design for our new website, we decided to go against this trend by putting more emphasis on the people at our firm and less on the transactional aspect of hiring an investigator.
Our web designer, Daniel Quinn, explained his approach to the design of our new website:
We wanted the design to not overwhelm the content, as Dinolt’s case studies contained very practical examples of the kind of work the firm does. This is why we made the case studies front-and-center on the homepage: we wanted visitors to jump right into seeing how intimate these investigations can get. To this end we crafted a few titles for the case studies as interesting leads and dropped pull-quotes for what we thought were defining assertions of the brand’s identity. It’s this close and personal aspect of their work that we thought makes the firm compelling, and a lot of their competition was thin on the details.
It can indeed be challenging for many small investigative firms to showcase what makes them unique, since many of the owners of small firms are the same people doing surveillance or undercover assignments. They therefore can’t post a picture or disclose too much about themselves, since doing so might compromise their investigations. For this reason, many investigators’ websites can seem impersonal, with a lot of emphasis on the services they offer but not much focus on what differentiates them from the thousands of other private investigators out there. Thankfully, as a midsized firm with a dedicated management and adminstrative staff, we have a bit more flexibility about what we can share with the public.
We could have decided to jump on the bandwagon and create an app interface with forms and blank fields to make soliciting our services more automated, but instead we opted to show you more of ourselves. We want you to get to know our team before you hire us, and for that reason we beefed up our biographies on the new site and have included photographs for our management staff. We also added a blog-like space on the new site, a place for us to share more candid commentary. It’s our hope that through posts like this one you’ll be able to glean more insight into our personalities and values.
While technology often plays a major factor in our investigations, it is the people at our firm that make us special: it’s our investigators who sometimes work all night to meet a deadline; it’s our managers who draw from nearly a hundred years of cumulative experience to make the difficult decisions that frequently come up in our investigations. When we redesigned our website we wanted to highlight our team, comprised of intelligent, creative, compassionate, and exceedingly hardworking people. They’re in the investigations business because they’re very good at it and because they enjoy doing it.
In other words, we’re not robots; it’s a labor of love.
Happy Labor Day!