Permanent Redirect: Distilled Office
(We do go off topic from time to time, so if you’re just here for the SEO & Reputation Management advice, feel free to skip this post!)
As I tweeted earlier in the week:
“Moving office is much like 301ing a website. First you move all your content, then you hope the spiders will follow.”
… and now it’s time to stretch that analogy to breaking point.
Distilled moved to our new offices last week, and now that everything’s plugged in and running, we wanted to share some snaps from ‘move day’ with you, and give you a quick look inside our new pad.
Prepare your destination
If you’re moving to a new domain, then you might have bought something that better describes what your website does, has a stronger brand, or is more relevant to your Geographic region.
In Distilled’s case, our task was to find an office that would provide enough room for the ever-growing team in a suitable London location.
Once the contract was signed, we set about making it ‘our’ office; this primarily involved making sure that at least one wall was painted in each of the Distilled colours.
Consider this us planning out 'Information Architecture'
This was about two days before 'move day'. Parkinson's Law mentions something about this, I think.
Our server rack (picture here, empty) will fit into a room larger than Distilled's first London office.
Prepare for the big move
Before moving your site (or office) you can use the opportunity to make sure everything’s in top order. This can include getting rid of any pages (or packets of mouldy cheese) that you don’t need anymore.
Will, Duncan and Sarah check our 'old media storage facility'
Andy was tasked with braving the fridge, and throwing away anything that passed the Turing Test.
We have one client who leaves every meeting with handfulls of our stationary, so we'll have to keep the new office fully stocked for him too.
Being forced to spend a day offline was quite cathartic in a way. Though I did miss StumbleUpon by the end of the day.
Ready … Set … Go!
When everything’s prepared and you’re ready to move a domain, it’s usually a case of renaming an .htaccess file somewhere and sitting back to watch.
In our case, it took a little longer to drive five van-loads of furniture, computers and other paraphernalia back-and-forth across the Thames. Here’s what part of that process would look like if we were able to magically speed up time:
Update Your Links
We’ve got a notice on the door of the old office, a redirection with the post office, and a brand spanking new map for visitors to follow.
We’ve pretty much ironed out all the kinks (though I did have a nightmare about our terrifying basement, after making the mistake of going down to see what was in there) and we’ll be putting the finishing touches to our new pad very soon.
Start using & showing off your new office domain
It’s been a crazy busy week for everyone in the search marketing, design and development teams. Here’s us hard at work in the part of the new place:
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StalkerB on Fri (17 Apr) @ 1:30 pm
Nice product placement for Intercrate Rentals. Hope you’re getting suitably re-imbursed
Maybe I’m just getting cynical in my old age.
New offices look sweet.
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Alex Craven on Fri (17 Apr) @ 1:41 pm
new offices look great guys.. and a really nice post idea!
Hope you’re all settled.
cheers
Alex
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stuartpturner on Fri (17 Apr) @ 1:52 pm
Good work there boys (and girls). The new office looks very much nice, although I little remeniscent of the place they take Alex to in Clockwork Orange.
Just kidding, or am I?
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robbothan on Fri (17 Apr) @ 1:58 pm
Love that video… tho seems to be a lot of sitting down on the tables! maybe thats why i want to work for distilled!
Looks like a great office, looking forward to popping by some day!
Stuart are you suggesting that Distilled are going to go all clockwork orange on us? Maybe thats what was in the basement….
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David Mihm on Fri (17 Apr) @ 2:13 pm
Awesome video. I think I saw Will picking his nose in one frame but it moved so fast I couldn’t say for sure (just kidding).
Your new offices look seriously cool; I guess I’ll just have to make another visit to London sometime in the near future
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Tom Critchlow on Fri (17 Apr) @ 3:41 pm
Thanks for the kind words guys – the new offices are pretty cool! Except for the basement. God the basement. I’m still scarred. It’s fricking scary down there….
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stuartpturner on Fri (17 Apr) @ 7:41 pm
@robbothan @tomcritchlow sounds like a Grudge type situation to me! My friends have a basement they don’t dare go in…
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Rob on Mon (20 Apr) @ 9:33 am
Thanks for the comments; it’s quite exciting to have a new change of scenery, and so much more space. The timelapse video comes courtesy of Mat’s 10mm wide-angle.
@David: as if you need any other excuse?
@Stuart: I don’t know Clockwork Orange well enough – I’m going to have to watch it again now to check…
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Martin Hegelund on Tue (5 May) @ 8:39 pm
It indeed looks very nice. And I really liked your analogy too!
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A cabinet reshuffle of our own. | Distilled blog on Mon (8 Jun) @ 10:47 am
[...] Over the last 4 years Will and I have had the challenge and the pleasure of growing Distilled from just the two of us working out of my front room, to where we are today. We deliberately decided not to take any funding, and have bootstrapped our way through 5 offices to our current situation with 15 staff and our fantastic new offices. [...]