Blogging

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

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 we really had a very free rein (within the confines of the brief of course!).

The brief for this blog design was to create something that felt fresh, uplifting and healthy. I think it’s a great example of a very clean and professional Spring design. You can just feel the energy bursting out of that green can’t you? And yet the purple keeps it restrained and the attention to detail in the layout and typography keeps the whole feel professional and smart.

I really can’t wait to get this live for Harriet as I know it’ll be a great platform for her to start to launch her business. Keep your eyes peeled too because over the next week or so we’ll be sharing the new website design for Nutribeing with you too…

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

Rarely does a week go by when someone doesn’t ask me the question “How on earth do you find the time to blog?”. I too, have been the victim of the “I don’t know how she does it” type comments. Small children, business, baking etc – where does blogging fit into my time?

I know that many of you find it hard to find the time to blog, and so I thought it might be helpful to talk about how to find the time, and what you might do to carve out a little time for your blog.

Don’t waste energy on what you should have done

First up, I’m the first to admit that I should sometimes blog more regularly. Sometimes I blog every day, sometimes a week or two slips by without me finding time to post. I’m not going to berate myself over that, and I recommend you don’t either.

Right now we are having major renovations done on our house. I’m pretty laid back about a bit of mess, even chaos, at times, but this has really floored me. We moved back in to our house on Sunday (about two weeks sooner than we should have done I think) – no heating, no electrics, no hot water and the back of the house ply-boarded up. It hasn’t been fun, and it’s affected the time and energy I’ve had to blog. I hope you don’t have the major upheaval that I’ve got, but there will be times when it isn’t humanly possible to blog. That’s ok.

Make it part of your routine

As MD of the business, I know that the buck stops with me when it comes to attracting and keeping customers. Sure, I have two fabulous Account Executives, but it’s my job to drive the business forward, and experience has shown me time and time again that this blog helps me attract and retain clients. Therefore I need to make time for it.

I was at Vanessa Langham Day’s Entrepreneur’s Circle yesterday and she reminded us that as business owners we should be spending 20% of our time every day on driving the business forwards. That means an hour and a half a day (or an hour and a half of each of the three days that I work) on marketing. Updating your website, making strategic plans, implementing your website and writing your blog. Do you invest that much time in your marketing? If you work full time that means a whole day a week! Imagine what that could do for your business if you did that week in week out.

So there’s no getting around the fact that you just need to make the time.

Write a “job lot” of posts for efficiency

I’ve taken most of Friday to work on marketing and have already written three posts and will probably write a couple more that I’ll schedule over the course of next week (or this week, as you’re reading this next week!). That means that every week I can go into the week knowing that I have some blog activity going on.

Write posts around a specific theme

I always find that writing a series of blog posts gets a better response from my readers and is easier to write – the challenge is, it takes brain space (which is often quite hard to find when you’re living on a building site )

What else do you do to make time to blog? And what’s getting in your way? I’d love your thoughts!

Tagged as in Blogging

Angela Marshall is an author and one of the country’s leading image consultants. I’ve known her for years since I met her networking when I first started my business, and I was delighted when Angela invited to give her blog an image makeover. Angela works with large corporates: often financial institutions and professional services, and [...]

Tagged as , angela marshall, appearance management, blog design in Blogging, Case Studies, From The Studio

 So you want to take better photographs of food for your website or blog but don’t know where to start? Rush out and get yourselves a copy of the gorgeous Plate to Pixel: Digital Food Photography & Styling, go on, right now! Rarely do I leap about quite so much over a book as this [...]

Tagged as in Blogging, Recommended Reading

Ahead of tomorrow’s sell out blogging workshop I thought it might be fun to combine a little list of my own “must have” tools for bloggers. Looking down my list again it’s probably fair to say that most of these apply mostly to creative bloggers – those of you that write cutting edge, hard-nosed business [...]

Tagged as in Blogging, Inspirations

In my last post we looked at how using colour blocks alongside an image can be incredibly inspiring and bring your blog to life. Now I want to show you how to do it. The tutorial below uses Photoshop but I’m pretty sure that the steps will be very similar if you have Photoshop Elements. [...]

Tagged as , Photoshop tutorial in Blogging, Graphic Design, Tutorials

I love pulling colour out of images. I find it brings the image to life and is creatively incredibly inspiring for me. The lovely Jennie does this so beautifully on her blog The Odessa May Society with her Color Dose series. I find it so addictive that I would just love to do the same for the Full Bloom [...]

Tagged as , Odessa May Society in Blogging, Case Studies, Graphic Design, Inspirations

Most blogging packages have a “caption” tool, but if you want to add a beautiful caption then you need to get creative and use an image editing programme. Now for my creative work I tend to use Adobe Photoshop (for web and creatively editing images) or Adobe InDesign for the print work. I’m going to [...]

Tagged as , Photoshop tutorial in Blogging, Graphic Design, Tutorials

So you can just slap your images into your blog and be done with it. And if you take beautiful photographs then that’s a good start. But if you’re anything like me you’ll like things to look nice, and just slapping in your images probably won’t cut it. So here are a few inspirations that [...]

Tagged as in Blogging, Graphic Design, Online Marketing