If your in-house agency is anything like ours then you’re constantly asking yourself, “How do we gain recognition for what we do at our company?” We can conduct informational meetings and pass out all the team-branded swag we want, but at Team IDEA, the in-house creative services and events agency at Cars.com, we decided to take it one step further—we built a website.

It can be easy to overlook the most commonplatform for promotion because we are in house—but by having a central hub to showcase Team IDEA’s work, we’re more easily able to have something to point to when people ask, “So, what exactly do you do?”

Since our team was formed four years ago, we’ve looked for ways to elevate our profile within the business and let people know we’re a one-stop shop for creative and events work. Right off the bat we created a brand for ourselves, though we also wondered if there was something more we could do to get the word out about Team IDEA.

After a few weeks of brainstorming, concepting and figuring out what we wanted to feature, our senior interactive designer got to work on the heavy lifting. Using a highly customized Wordpress template, we built a site that solidifies our team brand while sharing personal details about each of us as well as examples of our recent work.

Our site didn’t come to life overnight. It took several months—often pushed to the back burner because we had client work to do. Now that it’s an active page, maintenance is simple and everyone can contribute. We’re even incorporating a blog to which all team members can add posts. We want it to be a collaborative, living representation of how we work.

And, the site isn’t just for internal audiences. We’re proud of what we do and we want to share it with anyone who’s interested! Having a public-facing site will, we hope, begin to help us build connections with other internal creative agencies—much in the way IHAF does—and even provide us with an easy way to show off our latest projects to Mom and Dad. 

Building the Team IDEA site was truly a team effort. From the beginning, choosing what work we wanted to showcase from both the creative and events side proved challenging. What were the dozen or so projects we felt best embodied our spirit, creativity and brand expertise?

It would have been easy to share only the flashiest or highest-profile work, but that doesn’t speak to the breadth of what we do. We put on events for thousands of people; we also write and design insights-driven case studies and create real-life, everyday solutions for customers. The work on our site shows that Team IDEA is theresource for all Cars.com creative and event needs.

Questions? Ask away! We’ll be happy to chat about our experience building our team’s site if you’re looking to do the same.