Authors: Vika x Pupcakes (Season VI)
An Inside Look at Raiding
There are a lot of DAOs out there trying to make a difference in the Web3 space, yet few are active year after year. RaidGuild DAO has been active for several years now, successfully completing work for clients like Gitcoin, SuperFluid, DAOHaus, and Hypercerts. RaidGuild offers a wide range of services, including full-stack development, design, marketing, and Web3-related consultations such as tokenomics and DAO consulting. For those who might not be familiar with RaidGuild's vocabulary, a Raid is an external project with a client, like a freelance gig, on which a team consisting of DAO members works together. So, raiding means working on a client's project.
Most of the things happening within RaidGuild, including the actual work, are discussed in channels unavailable to non-members. Some of the Guilds' best-kept secrets are the expertise and professionalism of its members. We have interviewed RaidGuild members Sasquatch and Sero on their latest adventure on a website redesign Raid for the POKT Network. We've received permission from both sides to share the process of this project. This article offers you, the reader, a rare inside look from the perspective of the team working on this Raid. Stay tuned for the upcoming article, which focuses on the feedback the team received from the client and how the process looked from their perspective.
Preparation
This project was part of an ongoing relationship POKT has with RaidGuild. POKT Network has been in the industry for quite some time now. Throughout the years, their brand identity, community and values evolved from what it had been in the beginning. It was about time to get a fresh look, corresponding to this changed feeling. POKT was looking for someone to rethink their branding, in particular, they wanted to get their website redesigned. For this reason, they opened a call for proposals where teams could place bids to compete with others for an opportunity to get selected for the job.
Sasquatch gathered together a team including those who had worked with POKT before. This team eventually ended up including:
Sasquatch as an account manager and project manager.
Sero as a front-end developer building the site.
Bennisan, Bingo, and Chiali as designers.
Degenroach as a SEO specialist.
Together, the team compiled a bid based on the things wanted by the client. There were some back-and-forth calls to make sure everyone was on the same page. Luckily for our Raiders, POKT was quite confident in their skills due to previous collaborations and picked RaidGuild to work on this project.
Design Work
The first part of the project was a design sprint. There were 3 designers participating in this phase of the project, which was crucial for developing a branding identity that would fit the client's needs. The discovery phase, naturally, included comprehensive discussions on the existing and envisioned identity and goals of POKT. The team, in collaboration with POKT, drew inspiration from other websites and analyzed what was lacking in the original design.
The designers crafted three different branding directions for the client to choose one that feels closest to their vision. This was then further improved and developed based on the comments and suggestions from the client.
One of the things that POKT was particularly impressed by during the process, was the attention the raiding team put into the history and goals of the company. They compiled a large questionnaire for POKT to share around their community, which went into specific details about the current brand identity and the branding goals the POKT team had in mind. While it is impossible to please everyone in a redesign, it helps to break down exactly why certain design choices were made.
For example, hearing that POKT wants to be perceived as more simple and modern, the Raiders tried to convey this already with the redesigned logo.
Development
With the design finalized, development could start. The website was built by Sero with Webflow. Here is the result of our work.
There was some work done on SEO as well. Closer to the end of the project, Degenroach worked on the SEO of the final design. Thanks to Degenroach's final touches on the project, POKT's new website is now ranked first in Google for the keyword 'POKT'.
Revisions and Feedback
A few rounds of reviews were needed to finalize everything. All in all, it took 2 weeks for revisions to be completed.
Retrospective
Feedback from POKT saw this project as a huge success. Sero has been offered to maintain the website on a retainer. In terms of the things that they think could have gone better, Sasquatch mentioned a few challenges that they encountered:
“It was nice to have those original branding variations, and I would reuse that approach in a branding exercise. But when it comes to implementing the chosen design, I would want to pick one person, ideally, the person who suggested that design.
[...]
Also, I think one area I could've managed better was organizing clear and regular meetings so that we could have better visibility on what everybody's doing.”
Sero mentioned the need for a more standardized review process
“When something changes in one place, it has to be updated everywhere else too. So, having a more standardized review process could help the whole Guild boost our output and strengthen our relationships with clients.”
Winning POKT Network over to work together again by placing a bid in response to their call for proposals is, according to Sasquatch, a signal that there is more work out there for RaidGuild. He thinks it is worth a shot to keep an eye out for similar opportunities and apply instead of waiting for clients to discover RaidGuild themselves and reach out with a project.
Summarizing the work on this project, Sasquatch said:
“I would say I am very proud of the result, very proud of the feedback from the client, and very proud of the teamwork that we had.”
