Evolving a startup ecosystem into a scalable digital experience

Geekdom started as a coworking space in downtown San Antonio and grew to encompass services and vision beyond that. As their 10 year anniversary approached, Geekdom shifted from a coworking space to an acceleration and incubation hub for startups in South Texas. They needed a website that reflected their path, their deliberate technique to nurture startups: ideate, cultivate, shape and grow. The website also needed a more friendly and scalable administrative dashboard, SEO compatibility and reflected their refreshed branding.

The challenge was not just to redesign a website. Geekdom had a physical-first startup guidebook built around the stages of Ideate, Cultivate, Shape, and Grow. Our job was to translate that framework into a clearer digital experience so founders, members, sponsors, and visitors could understand where they fit and find the right resources more quickly. That meant thinking through the site as a wayfinding system, not just a marketing page.

Herospace worked closely with a small team of decision-makers at Geekdom. Using the Geekdom Startup Guidebook we identified potential audiences and began introducing them to users in the navigation. We applied the branding from the guidebook (ideate, cultivate, shape and grow) to the website as another level of wayfinding. The Herospace team added micro-interactions throughout the site that not only enticed users to engage further but accomplished the secondary tasks of showcasing Geekdom as a coworking space and venue. 

 

Herospace delivered a product that highlights the client’s new vision and equips them with the necessary marketing tools to reach users in all phases of their  journey. The new logo and refreshed internal branding is represented on the site. In addition, the Herospace creative team proposed a new element to the branding: the dynamic illustrations. These were introduced as part of the new website visuals and were adopted by the Geekdom team and are being used in their new collateral.

The website is built on an easy-to-update platform allowing the Geekdom team to easily update content and manage SEO.