From the Create Design Studio Email Newsletter, for more great articles like this one sign up on our homepage (in the left column).

There are good reasons why the layout of some web-sites appears to follow an unofficial set of design rules that guides location of the menus and content.

How visitors use your web-pages
Research into the way that people use websites called ‘eyetracking’ has revealed that users tend to scan in the first instance along the top of the web page from left to right and then down the left hand side of the screen from top to bottom.

These places correspond with the usual menu and headline locations and these would appear to be the places people look to gauge content and navigation links. The obvious place for your branding is in this area so visitors can recognise who the site is about and where the information comes from. The amount of time site visitors spend looking for the thing they want is tiny, measured in seconds, so make it as easy as possible for them to find what they want. Clear and concise link titles mean visitors stay with your site rather than moving on to your competition.

Get their attention with a strong headline
The headline is the next thing the visitor reads. It is the most effective way to grab their attention. Writing concise headlines can help visitors find the information they want quickly and keep them on your site pages.

Use typefaces carefully for maximum legibility
The fonts you use should make your text easy to read, legibility is key to helping visitors actually read the text on your site pages. Don’t mix lots of different fonts on a single page, stick to one or two so that all your pages are consistent and look as though they come from the same source.

Colour can draw attention where you want it
Use colour to draw attention to your headlines, or to pull out quotes from customers from the main body text. However, don’t use too many colours on any one page – it’s visually distracting to page visitors. Stick to one or two colours and consider using tints of them if you need variations. Using clashing colours on web pages make it less likely that visitors will read your text and raises the chances of them choosing to go elsewhere.

The designer’s favourite: white space explained
Incorporate blank spaces around your content so site visitors don’t have to struggle to find what they want in a clutter of things. You don’t want your site pages to resemble a jumble sale where locating the right thing becomes a chore because this will drive away site visitors. Clear space also acts to draw attention to the most important things on the page, for example:

Any paragraph of text with wide margins assumes more
importance because it is isolated on the page.

For more impact, just add images
If you add pictures, choose ones that enhance what your story, illustrate your product effectively and show your visitor the thing they are searching for. Beautiful pictures are attractive but on their own they may not hold visitors on your website unless you happen to be selling the images as art. If your business is in the service industry associate your pictures with people, they could be your staff, your clients or stock images of the kind of people who might be interested in your service. This helps visitors to identify personally with your service and guides them to imagine using it.

Show off your business with the best possible images
A professional photographer will take pictures with better composition and lighting than any amateur snapshot, investment in good quality photography will give your web-pages a professional image for your business to present to potential clients.

Finding images that don’t cost a fortune
If you can’t afford a photographer there are sources of professional quality photographs that can be obtained from stock photography websites. Prices can vary, as can the quality of the images, and it is a good idea to check out several sites and browse the images they hold, before making any purchases. Check the terms and conditions of the site and make sure that any images you buy can be used freely on your website or in your printed materials.

Useful links:
Blogpost: Why you should update your website little and often
Blogpost: Your business is unique, let everyone know why
Webpage: The Create Design Studio Website Design and Build Service

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From the Create Design Studio Email Newsletter, for more great articles like this one sign up on our homepage (in the left column).

Create Design Studio have direct experience of the process of rebranding and we thought if you were considering rebranding your business we could pass on what we learned from doing it.

Reasons to rebrand
Your image may be tired, out of date or it may not reflect what you do anymore. If the sector you work in has gradually changed over the years, or your company pursues different work to that of the past and your existing branding no longer matchs your industry sector.

You may wish to actively change the direction of the business away from past activities and have decided to break completely with the old company image.

The right name for you
Often business names are based on the name of the person or people who started the company or a spin on what the company does or produces. It is helpful to name your company so that when it is mentioned to someone who has never come across you before, they are able to make an accurate guess at your area of business just from your company’s name. This will also help you online with search engine optimisation.

Once you have your short list of possible new names you will need to check which domain names are available, if you are an incorporated body you will also need to check with Companies House to see that no other company is using the name in your industry sector.

There is no particular form that you need to complete to change your company’s name, however on the Companies House website there are templates for the resolution that your directors or shareholders need to vote on in order to change your company’s name.

What will need to be redesigned?

Here is a checklist of all the things that you may have had branded with your existing company logo: (If you can think of some more please get in touch and I’ll add them!)

• Business cards
• Stationery
• Website and blog
• E-newsletter
• Brochures
• Flyers
• Adverts
• Packaging
• Company or Promotional notepads and pens
• Uniforms
• Signs
• Name Badges
• Exhibition banner
• Folders
• Vehicle graphics

The costs involved
You need to consider many costs. The obvious ones are reprinting of your stationery, business cards and brochure. Your adverts will need to be updated as well as the company website and blog, and your email newsletter may need to have the banner graphics updated. Don’t forget things like your invoice paper, if it is branded with your logo, your pull-up banner, folders and badges for meetings and exhibitions and freebies like notepads and post-it notes. The other thing to watch out for is rebranding company vehicles, especially if you have lots of them. The cost of rebranding to a one-person company may be limited to website and stationery changes but to a larger firm the costs will be proportionately larger – and need to be carefully planned to avoid overlap of the two brands as much as possible.

The benefits
After you have completed your rebranding exercise you have the perfect opportunity to contact all your customers, more than once, to let them know. Contact with customers for a positive reason, not purely to push sales is always good. Customers will be receptive to pure information, without pushy sales messages to get past, and are likely to be more receptive to any brochure you send with your notification letter.

Take the opportunity to email your customers some time after you send the first notification, direct them to the revised website or blog and draw their attention to new features or offers. And offer them all your e-newsletter with it’s new branding so you can contact them regularly with news about your company.

Organisation
The rebranding process takes time and effort, attention focuses in the early stages of thinking up new names and deciding what items need to be rebranded first and the others that can wait. A budget for the cost of the process is also a good idea, find out the costs of anything that needs to be printed or re-made and factor them into the cost of the whole process. Don’t forget that meetings and the decision making process all take up time, time in which you might normally be doing business, so add that to the costs as well.

If you can, get a calendar or wall-chart and try to plan the dates when you will make major changes. Working backwards from the date of the planned rebranding can be useful to allow you to forecast days when you will need to brief the printer, the web designer or programmer and when you may need to order anything else involved.

The calendar of events will also help you to plan when you will need to make payments to suppliers and when you may need to schedule meetings on the rebranding process – helping you to track costs.

Technical bits
When you have a graphic designer to help with logos and stationery redesign it can be helpful to have a set of design guidelines drawn up at the same time so that anything produced in the future, in any medium, can be made up using the same colours, typefaces and generally match the spirit of what you already have. Although these guidelines will cost you for set-up, they should save you money in future by speeding up the design times of anything else you have done later.

If your rebranding has changes your email address and website address you may need to adjust the settings on your PC, and your mobile devices, to collect mail from your new address. It’s worth testing this thoroughly before the big switchover, you don’t want to miss business because the email isn’t getting through. (If you need advice on this contact David Woodroofe who can help you with the technical set up of websites and email.)

Using your rebranded items
As soon as you have a calendar of rebranding activities and your new stationery comes in, start to distribute them on the allotted days when you go networking or have meetings to spread the word about the rebranding. Send out your new stationery and brochures to all your clients and take this golden opportunity to re-connect with them and hopefully kick-start some new orders.

Create Design Studio offer a complete branding report service for £499 and we can design a whole new corporate identity for your business to give your company a fresh start, logo design concepts begin at £480, so call David Woodroofe on 01962 737989 today to get started on your new brand identity.

Links:
Create Design Studio Graphic Design Services
Our Logo Gallery Page on Facebook
Your business is unique, let everyone know why!

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