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

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…

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 Sport Surface Solutions.

We love to do things that shake things up a bit, get people to sit up and take notice of a company, and as ever, prove that design for small businesses can be just as well thought out, just as aspirational as design for the big boys. Chloe has really enjoyed the challenge of working on a very masculine, Winter design and I think she’s pulled it off with bells on.

Sport Surface Solutions do exactly what the name suggests. They install and maintain sports surfaces and are clearly doing the right thing getting their marketing literature in order right now in time for Olympic hysteria in the summer!

Chloe has developed a new logo design and brand identity as well as website design which ties the whole look together. Those of you that follow our passion for colour psychology will notice the Winter traits: strong colours, strong alignment and structure, premium feel and impactful images. There is no messing about here: this is a website design for a company that means business.

The designs are currently in the process of being finalised before we move on to the build (hence the positional rather than final images) but I will share the build with you once it’s complete… I hope you like

DR Solicitors are a niche law firm that specialise in law for the medical profession. I love DR Solicitors’ approach to business: flexible, expert and incredibly professional. Their new website really communicates their status as one of the leading niche law firms and certainly seems to be paying off in terms of attracting new business and also new partners to the firm.

Chief Executive Nils Christiansen comes from a management consultancy background and brings an appreciation for the value in technology and that additional dimension that comes from an external perspective. Daphne Robertson (the DR in DR Solicitors – the fact it also stands for doctor is a very happy accident!) brings the passion, focus on people and knowledge that their clients rate so highly.

I’m so pleased that DR Solicitors have a website that reflects their business standing and that they can be proud of

In Nil’s own words:

Thank you so much for all the hard work that you and your team have put in. I realise that we have been quite a demanding client, but we are delighted with the end product. I was presenting at a conference last night and it was great to finally be able to say with pride ‘check out our website…’

Check it out at http://www.drsolicitors.com/

Yehey! It’s been quite a week in the studio for getting websites live. Stuart has a number of quite chunky ecommerce sites to finish off this week and next but he certainly hasn’t been twiddling his thumbs recently! I have a whole host of delicious websites and blogs to share with you over the next week or so, and I just love this blog we’ve launched for writer’s coach Leda Sammarco.

Leda has been working with us for some time now on her brand identity (you may remember me blogging it back in March?) and we recently launched her new website and blog.

I love the journal style design of Leda’s blog and the clarity and cleanliness of the design.

I know that Leda loves the ease and simplicity at which she can update her website because she sent us this lovely email last week.

Hi Stuart,

Hurray! Something gorgeous to look at! This is Chloe’s first draft for the eCommerce website design for Harvey Maria. What do you think?

Remember the current website?

Visually and structurally there was a lot to do.

Make it feel more aspirational, easy to use and something that reflects our brand values and engages our target audience were just some of the elements of our brief from Harvey Maria.

The new look is certainly much cleaner, more sophisticated and more engaging. I love the new logo (which incidentally Harvey Maria brought with them from another agency, we all felt it worked really well and it adds a lot to the new design). The grey allows the fabulous tiles to shine and lets the flooring really speak for itself.

And here’s the Collection page

And this is the collection page as it stands. Improved navigation, a more sophisticated colour palette for the product information and the ability to access other collections from the same page make a real difference to the end result I think.

So I love the new design. I love the elegance, the sophisticated colour palette and the engaging typography. But this is very much a work in progress so we would love your thoughts and feedback!

The Wireframes

Between every website brief and website design comes the planning and the wireframing. This is where we sketch out how the site will work, what bits need to go where and how the functional bits of the site will come together. In a simple brochure website this is often just a case of sketching out a couple of boxes, or perhaps even letting the designer take control at the design stage if it’s a very simple site.

With something more complex like the Harvey Maria ecommerce website, we needed a lot more time to get the structure right.

As I mentioned in my last post, not only was the design in need of a little TLC, we were also very keen to improve the functionality. Simple things like how visitors view and search for the floor tiles as well as wider issues like how they move around the site.

Planning, planning and more planning

Caroline, our Creative Director, Stuart, our Senior Web Developer, and I spent a long time planning how we would fit all the elements together. There was a lot of bashing our heads together around certain elements (the sampling service and the tile browsing spring to mind in particular!) and we thought long and hard about the structure, functionality, practicality, usability (is that enough ility’s?) as well as the social media elements of the site.

All the time we put in at the outset on this has really paid off. It’s meant that our clients have been able to focus solely on the functionality and structure without getting distracted by the pretty bits. And it has also meant that Chloe has been able to focus on making it look pretty, confident that the structure works.

Getting the detail right before the design

Here are the wireframes, in all their glory. It took four revisions to get this bit right, but as it was such a complex site it made a lot of sense.

Homepage

The current website is overwhelming in terms of where to click first and what to do. We wanted to make the journey as straightforward and funnelled as possible, which should make a big difference to the sites’ bounce rate and conversion rates. Still work to do at this point but the idea was that if you are looking for a particular type of flooring that you can find it from the homepage.

Things like showing the number of tiles in each section gives the visitor more power and knowledge and makes the experience on site more enjoyable.

And the final homepage layout.

Next up I’ll share with you the designs, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I’m delighted to share our latest website design for Sera Golding’s MIB Band: The MIB Experience. Remember when I interviewed Sera back in the summer and she talked about the amazing upscale events they were playing – from Jewish weddings to large scale corporate events and private parties? Sera has an enormous range of quality bands and musicians that can really offer a comprehensive solution and Sera needed a website that reflected the quality and diversity of what MIB can offer.

I love the design: classy, energetic and very, very premium without being stuffy, because whilst MIB play at some incredibly high profile events, including the Royal Wedding Celebrations in Hyde Park, stuffy they ain’t.

The techy bit

At Sera’s request we have created an interactive booking form that enables guests to tailor the entertainment to their event.

Event organisers or potential clients can browse the offerings for each part of the event; from “The First Dance” for a wedding to “The Evening Reception”. Sera has so many offerings that organising her bands and artists in this method makes it much easier for people to create their very own MIB Experience from the suggestions Sera has made. It works very much like a “shopping cart” with categories and options that Sera can modify at the back end.

There’s been a fair amount of coding in this, and Stu, our Senior Web Developer, has built the website on our proprietary Nourish content management system which has meant that we’ve been able to tailor the back end to suit Sera’s needs completely. I think Stu has also had a lot of fun creating this website, as I know Rob did with designing it!

Here are a couple more screenshots from the site, but do go and take a look yourself! You’ll find it at http://themibexperience.com/

What do you think?

I have been bursting to share this with you for longer than I can remember.

We first met Emma de Polnay at our Focus and Flourish workshop in December where we helped Emma shape her vision for her business in 2011. Excitingly we then met with Emma again in June to talk about a rebrand and new website for My Special PA. It’s fair to say that Emma’s business is going great guns this year, and what better a way to celebrate than with an elegant new brand identity and website design?

The Brief

My Special PA specialises in providing personal and virtual assistants to all manner of creative businesses: from artists to interior designers, architects to design agencies and everything in between. They provide the much needed organisation and detail to a sea of creatives much preferring to be in the space their best!

One of the things I have loved the most about working on this project is the collaboration and teamwork we have had. Emma had a strong vision around what would be right, but needed our creativity to pull it all together and take it up several levels. Bella Pieroni, one of Emma’s clients and the artist that created the fabulous illustrations of the butterflies and the comedy sketches, Esme, one of Emma’s Special PA’s who ensured that every i was dotted and t crossed, and of course the Flourish team who delivered both elegantly beautiful designs and a website that is easy to update and easy to optimise. (In fact, as an aside, Emma’s SEO consultant told Stuart that he had built the best Content Management System she had ever come across – praise indeed!)

The Approach

Chloe created an incredibly elegant logo design and followed this elegance across the brand identity. Our original concept was to letterpress the business cards (this brand identity would look amazing letterpressed) and this certainly influenced much of the understated style of the website.

One of the challenges with this site is that it both needs to feel ordered and neat but with a creative twist. Many creatives, with serious levels of attention to detail when it comes to design, are going to be looking at the site and so as ever, thought and care was essential. I love the simplicity of the typography, the colours are punchy but used sparingly so as not to go OTT and the illustrations just bring the whole thing together.

Here are some screenshots from around the site, but do go and take a look yourself and let us know what you think! http://myspecialpa.co.uk/

When was the last time you reviewed your website? I mean properly and objectively reviewed it, rather than just looked the other way when you opened the site by mistake? I always recommend my clients review their sites at least every six months, at the very least. It’s amazing how much your business will change, the market will move on and your customers needs will change over six months, and it’s important that your website is always business ready.

By business ready I mean that it needs to be ready to attract the right sorts of clients; position you in the best possible light and provide conviction that you are the best company for the job. Often small tweaks, changes to images or adjustments to your copy can be all it takes to get your website business ready again. Sometimes it’s about adding in a couple of extra pages or taking out irrelevant information. And sometimes (and only sometimes) you need to throw everything out and start again.

Here’s how to get your website business ready

Ask yourself: what do we want to be known for, what are we best at, what work do we want to win through the website? Now be honest – are your words, images and design communicating that?

What is the goal of the website? I was talking to a potential new client yesterday who was frustrated that her website didn’t get her more members joining. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that the fact there was nothing on the homepage asking you to become a member, no pages to outline the benefits of membership and no imagery to lead your eye to the membership section. I suspect that if we had delved a little deeper there would have been more that we could have found to help her achieve her goals, but often an objective glance is invaluable.

What’s working, what’s not? Use your gut feel, client feedback and anecdotal evidence as well as information that you can glean from Google Analityics. We find the exit pages, site overlay and general information invaluable when gaining feedback on how well a website is performing. Come up with a plan of what needs to change.

What information is out of date? Team members perhaps, products that are out of stock or no longer in use. Is everything that you provide or sell on there? I realise that I am highly innovative and will often change things at the drop of a hat (much to the delight of my staff as you can imagine) but almost all businesses will develop and change over time – make sure you keep your website up to date to reflect this.

If you have a website with a content management system, then much of what you learn throughout this process you’ll be able to implement yourself. Most of it is likely to involve changes to your website copy, perhaps to some of the images or perhaps small tweaks to the structure. So go on, give yourself just half an hour to get your website ready – I promise you’ll thank me!

ps. I really do practice what I preach. Having tweaked, nipped and tucked the Flourish website over the last 18 months we are now in the process of a bit of a redesign… But that’s another story for another day