Websites

Liezl Croft is an utterly lovely wedding and family portrait photographer. A force of South African fabulousness, creative, warm, friendly and with an eye for fun she asked us to create a brand refresh and blogsite that would reflect where her business is today as well as (of course) attracting and retaining lots of new clients.

And whilst we’ve been working with her on her printed literature now for several years, I was delighted when she asked us to give her blog a brandover. Having set up her business less than two years ago, Liezl had previously created her websites herself and felt that her business was at a level where she was ready to step things up a gear.

As well as being a cracking lifestyle photographer, Liezl is also very crafty and I think you’ll see that come through in the look and feel of the site.

We’ve worked on creating direct mail for Liezl in the past (which we won a design award last year for) but this project gave us the chance to really flex our creative muscles! We designed to create Liezl a WordPress based blogsite – a website and blog rolled into one which would give her the chance to showcase her photography without being too onerous to manage.

We put together a colour palette that created an aspirational feel, whilst plenty of texture and elements like the bunting creates a sensory quality and follows on from the work we did previously on the mailers. We all love the icons that Chloe created for each category, and the beautiful pattern that sets off the blog. I’d always known that Liezl’s work was beautiful, but what I hadn’t appreciated was the enormous difference the right surroundings make to her images.

If you take a look at the difference between the old blog and the new, I think you’ll agree they’re night and day apart.

Liezl’s old blog

I don’t want to embarrass anyone by going into this too heavily, let’s just say that the design of the blog had a long way to catch up with the quality of Liezl’s work…

And the new blogsite

Liezl has been so much fun to work with on this project and we wish her lots of luck with the new site and branding. It’s too early to measure the financial success of the blog – it’s been live for less than a month, but visits have doubled and the feedback to Liezl’s Facebook and Twitter page was overwhelming! Do hope on over and take a look (and do leave her a comment too, it’s so lovely to receive feedback when you’re writing your heart out and you know how lonely it can be when you’re first blogging)… You’ll find Liezl’s website and blog at www.liezlcroft.com

Tagged as in Blogging, Case Studies, From The Studio, Web Design, Websites

If you’ve been following the news recently major websites such as Wikipedia and WordPress.org are running a 24 hour blackout today in response to the two bills SOPA and PIPA that are making their way through congress. I won’t go over the full details here. A search for “SOPA Blackout”, “WordPress Blackout” etc should suffice for you.

What I thought I would do is take the time to comment on how their blackouts are not really blackouts. And all because of Search Engine Optimisation.

I’m going to take WordPress.org and Wikipedia as an example for my post (as they are, to me, the main websites staging this blackout). If you load any page on their sites today you will be confronted by the following pages:

However, on further inspection, these blackout ‘faces’ to these websites are simply masking the content sitting behind them. These websites will load all of the normal content that they should show and then force a full screen display over the top.

With a few bits of in-browser Javascript* you are able to view the full content behind the page as it should be.

So why haven’t they replaced their entire websites to actually ‘black out’?

Being some of the biggest websites on the internet they achieve results through strong search engine rankings. Their sites are rich in content and Google (and others) will check them regularly for any updates in content and update their records of that website accordingly. When a Search Engine wants to look at a website it requests a copy of the ‘source’ of a page just like your browser does. Your browser would then convert this ‘source’ or ‘code’ into a nicely styled version for you to view with pleasure. Search Engines don’t have this same wish for aesthetics and will happily read through the code they’re given to understand what that website is about.

What this is in effect doing is keeping all of the content there to keep their search engines happy but then masking each page using those styles I was talking about to hide the useful content from the user audience. This is instead of supplying user and search engine with just the content and styles for these black out messages.

Now if these websites just supplied the content for the  black out messages then when Google does its check today it will decide that every page on their site now reads on the lines of “WordPress.org protests the protect IP act”. Suddenly you will see every page drop out of its place in the rankings. I guess this is a risk that both websites could not take.

Admittedly for these large websites it wouldn’t take them long to be re-ranked once their normal website content comes back online. And with the number of users that will surf directly to wikipedia.org or wordpress.org without going through a search engine they should still see their traffic rise once again. However this is all theoretical and should happen but will not necessarily happen.

Does this make their stand of less value?

Some could say it does and some could say it doesn’t. Unless you work with websites for a living none of this may be at all obvious to you at all and it will be as though the websites are inaccessible to their normal content. However for me it does show that they’re not willing to take the search engine ranking hit to have a real black out. And taking that hit would potentially be great headlines in the fight against the SOPA and PIPA legislation. But their websites will be left at a huge disadvantage online.

So what do you think?

*Javascript is functionality code that runs within the user’s browser once it has loaded the content of a website. It is most commonly used for powering website slide shows and other pretty things.

**If you would like me to clarify anything in this post please leave a comment and I will do my best to help.

Tagged as in Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, web development, Websites

I know it’s oh-so-tempting to go into lockdown mode come early December. Those marketing projects you have at the back of your mind can wait until after Christmas whilst you deal with the general madness of the festive season.

And I do understand that thinking, but it doesn’t make good business sense. Why? Because that same slow decline into Christmas is often mirrored on the other side, and it’s often February before life lets you start planning ahead. As you know, we’re working hard to dangle some carrots to get you thinking about your websites and logos this side of Christmas (and whilst we will be dangling some carrots in January, our biggest carrots will go to the lovely people who have already started thinking ahead!) and so I thought that we might celebrate some of those Forward Thinkers on the blog.

Introducing… Griffin Glasshouses

Linda Lane is Managing Director of Griffin Glasshouses and one of our first Forward Thinkers. Linda is planning ahead for a busy Spring season and has asked us to create a new website. We spent a couple of hours mapping out the website with Linda and her team – planning the customer journey, understanding how we could make the most of Griffin’s sales funnel and understanding how the site should be structured.

For the last couple of weeks Linda has been able to focus on her day job whilst we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes: developing concepts. creating wireframes and this week, creating a knockout design that I hope knocks the socks off the current design.

The Current Website

Naturally there’ll need to be a little input (when Linda and her team are ready) to review the designs and feed back to us with any changes, but the idea is that the whole process is as efficient as possible to enable the Griffin Glasshouse team to focus on what they do best while we do what we do best.

And with a small sprinkle of Flourish magic dust

This is a bit of a work in progress, but you get the idea…

The next step is to create the look and feel for the rest of the pages once we know that these initial concepts are headed in the right direction. I’m really looking forward to seeing the impact the new design, navigation and structure have on the Griffin Glasshouse enquiry levels, and most importantly, their sales. Watch this space…

Tagged as in Branding, Case Studies, From The Studio, Graphic Design, Web Design, Websites

I class myself as one of life’s impatient. Once I’ve made a decision to do something, I want to get on with it right away. I struggled heavily with the concept of waiting six months for the right builder to be available to work on our house (especially as I’d been super organised and waited [...]

Tagged as in Flourish Stuff, Marketing, Websites

These posts are a bit like busses aren’t they? You wait for one In The Studio This Week and then two come along at once! Harriet Tipping is a very lovely nutritional therapist who has just about to launch her business, Nutribeing. She already had a logo but no brand identity to speak of, so [...]

Tagged as , blog design in Blogging, Case Studies, From The Studio

It seems like forever since I’ve shared a snapshot of some of our work from the studio doesn’t it? We’ve been incredibly busy over the last month or so working on some really exciting projects and I’m delighted to share a couple of them with you this week. First up… A stunning website design for [...]

Tagged as , website design in Case Studies, From The Studio, Web Design, Websites

The jury is still out on whether sales promotions can work for a service based business. I’m the first to admit that they can look desperate and potentially damaging to your brand. But at the same time, I do believe that if planned and communicated sensitively, they can even out the natural peaks and troughs [...]

Tagged as in Business Strategy, Marketing, Powerful Ecommerce

The Great Little Trading Company have had a fab campaign to persuade their clients to shop now for Christmas rather than leaving it any longer. I can’t say I’ve seen the comprehensive marketing that Stu describes with his eBuyer experience, but it’s a compelling sales promotion nonetheless. You see the problem with sales is that [...]

Tagged as , GLTC, Great Little Trading Company in Business Strategy, Marketing, Powerful Ecommerce, Websites

You may already be able to execute the perfect marketing strategy. You can send out your e-shots at the right time and get a fantastic open rate. You can come up with a clever way to get users to follow you on Twitter or ‘like’ your page on Facebook. But if your conversion point (where [...]

Tagged as in Online Marketing, Websites

Do you run a January sale? If you don’t, do you think you should be? We as consumers often see January sales as a way of retailers clearing stock. If you run a business that doesn’t hold stock – be it a craft business where you make everything to order or a service based business [...]

Tagged as in Business Strategy, Marketing, Online Marketing, Powerful Ecommerce