The website is called My Family Club and it’s aimed at all families who are feeling the financial pinch in these volatile economic times. It’s the biggest design and content project we have worked on this year and the launch date will soon be here. To say we are excited about it is a little bit of an understatement.

We don’t want to reveal all just yet, we’ll save the big launch post for another day. What we can say is that it was founded by mum of two Gemma Johnson who, inspired by her own experiences as a new mum living on a reduced on a budget, wanted to create a one-stop destination packed with financial advice, savvy tools and expert articles to help families save money and time.

You can sneak a preview of My Family Club on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.

Refreshing a website is a more natural evolution and benefits from an ongoing approach to see what can be enhanced and how these small changes or developments can give new life to your website. The goal of both approaches is to improve your website for your visitors, so it’s important to decide what your users need before embarking on a a full-on redesign project.

What is easier, is to get into the habit of regularly updating and refreshing your website and it’s design to keep it current and your visitors engaged. Here are a few of our tips:

1. Update your content

If you simply wish to lighten the tone of your site or make it more personable you may be looking at simply improving the tone of voice of your copy, adding new copy or offering the answers to your users’ niggling questions. To engage with your visitors you need to offer them essential information that they can rely on.

2. Refresh the imagery, colours and style

Review your use of imagery on the site. Could you use a few new photographs or maybe add a couple of galleries? What about changing the colour or styling within the site. Look at developing tools or functionality that will enhance your website and deliver real value to your visitors in a way that compliments your business.

3. Give people a reason for visiting your website

What are the main reasons why visitors should come to your website? If you’ve not asked yourself this question before, if you’re embarking on a website re-design project now is the ideal time. Your visitors interests and browsing behaviour will inform and direct how you go about creating these changes.

If it’s the first time you’ve done this it may identify others areas for improvement too. You may find users are looking for some functionality or interactivity that’s missing and a new tool or widget would compliment this. You may find that other elements or the way certain content is organised isn’t as intuitive or obvious as presumed. Take this information to streamline your website and improve things from the visitors perspective.

4. Define your website’s target audience

Identifying your user personas is essential in user experience design, and it means more than just looking at the most popular or frequent visitors to you website. You need to understand everything about them from their background, education, job, motivations, interests, hobbies and personal life. It may also be the first time you’ve taken a long hard look at the customers to your business. Put the time in because it can yield some fascinating insights and tangible benefits.

5. Provide content that your audience will want to share

If you  know your audience well you can anticipate the content that they will want to read, which will enable you to plan the type of content you should publish. You should also learn how your visitors like to access that information which will then inform your website design and architecture. Often it’s just a matter of re-imagining the content you already publish to appeal more directly to your customers. True understanding of your audience will help you to provide content they can share, from online tools to insightful articles that will get tagged, forwarded, bookmarked, liked and tweeted around the web, spreading the name of your business.

6. Identify areas for improvement

Regularly browse through your entire website with an impartial eye. Try to see it through the eyes of a new visitor and see what you find slow, frustrating or simply clunky. Any areas of stress or weakness should become apparent quite quickly and hopefully the solution shouldn’t be too far away.

A complex page that loads slowly? Spread the content across a section. Images that obscure the content? Look for a simple gallery or slideshow. Content that leads nowhere? Reorganise your content and introduce links or tags which will take visitors on to another page with more useful information about your business.

7. Maintaining your brand

The desire to do something different or new shouldn’t mean wiping the slate clean. Refreshing your website should be looked at as an opportunity to reinvigorate your brand, to put the energy and momentum back into it. Don’t change your typefaces and colours just for the sake of it, the desire to see something different from an internal point of view will merely dilute your brand in the eyes of your customers.

Look for ideas that can compliment, extend or enhance your brand. A new style of imagery that picks up your corporate colourways for example. Or a testimonials widget that picks out your logotype. Subtle pointers will strengthen your brand identity as a whole and reduce things like over-dependence on a logo.

8. Don’t be too precious

With any project that you invest a good deal of time and effort in it can be hard sometimes to let things go or make a change. Try to keep a clear perspective and remember these are improvements. It may have taken a long time to get a technical section working but if it contributes nothing to the site it might be serving visitors better another way.

Making your house into a home takes time. With constant improvements to update things in order to keep pace with the changes in your business and custom. A website can be viewed in a similar way, as a constant work in progress. Little enhancements, regularly along the way to keep everything up to date and save a lot of money on a major re-build project. Until you decide to move to a bigger house!

If you’re planning a website re-design, or you feel it’s time your design or content had a refresh, please get in touch.

If you want to increase your chances of being discovered by potential customers, follow these five simple steps:

1. Update your website regularly – daily if you can – with any new information about your business. You can add a news story about your industry, announce the arrival of a new member of staff or post details of an up-coming event.

2. Be relevant to your business goals. If you want to rank highly against your competitors and attract new business, make sure every new article you add to your site addresses the needs of your customers and provides the answers to your customer’s search queries.

3. Make use of the variety of web content available in addition to simple text. Add videos, photos or blog posts, invite your clients to post comments and link in your Twitter feed so there is always something new on the site to engage the visitor.

4. Pay attention to the small sections of your site. It’s all very well keeping your homepage fresh and up-to-date, but search can dig deeper into sites to find new content updates. Make sure even the static info sections about your company, products or services are up-dated on a regular basis.

5. Aim to set aside at least one day a month on general housekeeping on the website – are there any articles that are out of date? Can any sections be improved upon? Do you have a few customer testimonials you can add?

If you’re website content is stuck in a rut and you’d like to talk to us about it, please contact us below:

Want to know more?

If you would like to know more, discuss a project of your own or simply to get some advice then we’d love to hear from you.

Get in touch with SHO ››

Our first task was to undertake a design audit to research all of Concept’s marketing communications and to evaluate all the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to take the businesses brand forward. Our work for them to date has included a new business promotional mailing, presentation material and company brochure.

So when owner Katie Dick contacted SHO with a brief to refine and develop the brand identity and marketing literature for the company to make them stand out in the busy holistic health market, we agreed. As long as we could to try out her methods for ourselves!

As busy creatives regularly dependent on a diet of caffeine and chocolate to keep on track, we quickly signed up for one of Katie’s nutrition sessions to take control of our health, break some bad habits and boost our realistic goals designed to break old habits, and boost our creative potential.

Watch this space to see the results!

Experience and skill counts for an awful lot but a great idea can come from anywhere. So we’ve put together a few helpful pointers that can help to refine an idea and develop a narrative for a great brochure. To make it more than a collection of pages with product or service soundbites and a few pictures.

1 › Theme

It may sound like a strange idea but having a theme or concept for a brochure can immediately make it more memorable, create greater stand-out from competitors and help the recipients access the information more easily. It could be a simple idea that provides a thread through the whole brochure or a bigger concept that underpins everything. Whatever it is will immediately set your brochure apart from the rest that simply say ‘This is us and this is what we do’.

Try to think of HOW you do what you do, what are the values that set your business apart and what are the reasons your customers prefer you? If it’s the personal approach that customers value it may be a good idea to base the theme around the people who make the business what it is. If it’s the experience of an established business that brings it’s success that history could provide a graphic thread throughout the design.

2 › Format

Not everything has to be A4. A great way to stand out from everyone else is to use a different size, shape or binding method.

But don’t make a change just for changes sake, this is about standing out from the competition not sticking out like a sore thumb. Think about what will compliment your theme, perhaps its a page size or orientation that works more effectively with your images. A clever format will demonstrate your innovation, additional finishes your quality and attention to detail.

Stocks and materials have a texture your customers will notice. Have you ever kept something that felt too precious to throw away? Now wouldn’t it be great to associate that value with your business brand.

3 › Style of Imagery

Imagery is a hugely emotive thing. You can create a completely different tone with black & white images compared with colour, even when they’re the same subject. The style can unite disparate subjects and strengthen an approach into a single cohesive concept.

An example of a simple but effective image style is the use of colour. Different subjects can be united by their colour, for example a company’s tools or products could appear in the same colour, background colour or lighting technique. Obviously if the colour is a corporate colour this connection becomes even stronger, but the simple effect of uniting these elements can be striking and highly effective in it’s simplicity. Other examples are movement, focus and production (eg. BW images). Find the direction that suits your theme and build on it.

4 › Typography

Typography is the most often overlooked element of a brochure and yet it can be the most distinctive. Whether it’s simply overlooked or just undervalued, type can create the distinctive character and voice that sets your brochure apart from the rest. It provides the most consistent connection with a brand identity and can be the link that sets the design and layout free from the standard or ‘usual’ conformity.

Type can also be the most effective way to highlight details and focus attention on the important messages that you want to communicate. A clear information hierarchy can be defined with a good type style and enable readers to browse or read in detail with ease. The ability to access the information in your brochure easily will be appreciated, and these systems can also be extended to online too.

5 › Simplicity

It may seem odd to put simplicity into a list of things to do, but editing what you put into a brochure and it’s design is very important. The easiest way to spot a professionally designed brochure and something that was put together hastily will be the clutter and overworked nature of the design. It takes confidence to leave things out and quite often creating a ‘lighter touch’ is far harder. When something isn’t quite right the natural reaction is to add something else in looking for a fix.

Unfortunately when a design is overworked the common casualty is detail. If information is harder to find or obscured what does that express about the business? That it doesn’t have good attention to detail, that it lacks focus, that it’s far busier talking at it’s customers than listening?

Contrast that to the perceptions created by a clear and clean design that gives information the space it needs, with intuitive type styles to communicate easily. That will create a confident and considered impression. That the business is focussed and on the ball. We’re not saying a design can’t be complex and fun, but you should always consider the function of the design elements. If they don’t add something or perform a role it may be time to edit.

6 › Colour

We love colour. It doesn’t have to be bright to be distinctive and it’s a great way to keep things feeling fresh and new. A bold use of colour, whether printed or from the choice of stock, can elevate a brochure above it’s competitors.

Another great use of colour is as a focus device to drive attention to specific information or areas of interest. Consider how colour is often employed in a website as rollovers, links and highlighted sections around the user journey. Compare this to the way print employs colour in an editorial way and you’ll see the similarities.

These ideas offer you a host of options that can enable readers to engage with your brochure.

There are so many elements to building a website that it’s purpose can sometimes get diluted the process of making the site. The reality of bringing all the elements together is usually underestimated, so make sure you take the time to do it properly.

You may have already decided that you need a search friendly platform, that you want an eye-catching design using some professional images, you want to include an enticing content in a blog that your customers will read and you want to include links to social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook. It’s true that these ingredients can play a part in your websites success, but ticking the boxes of what should make a good website may not guarantee you will get a great website.

Ask yourself:

Why should it look this way?
Why will visitors want to come?
Why does this benefit visitors?
Why will they want to come back or refer the site?
Why does this benefit my website?

All these questions can be answered with a well made website. With good design and intuitive organisation, original styling, content that’s well thought out, concisely written, that has good relevance and delivers a benefit to visitors.

It’s very easy to copy ideas from competitors and peers. To make your website shine you must remember to ask yourself ‘Why?’.

The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was always going to be a hugely public affair, and Clarence House were wise enough to embrace all forms of social media from the outset. The Clarence House Twitter Feed the first with the wedding details using Facebook, Google, YouTube and Flickr to spread the news, comments, videos and pictures of the big day. Global traffic for the Royal Wedding live stream peaked during the Buckingham Palace Balcony appearance for ‘the kiss’ with an incredible 5.3million page views per minute.

Over 24 hours, the event had 2.7 million social media mentions, with a 94% share of those mentions on Twitter and 270,000 mentions on Facebook. There are some great stats and facts to be seen in this great Royal Wedding Social Media infographic by WebTrends on Mashable.

Overall, according to the Daily Mail, the Royal Wedding became the 6th biggest online event in history, generating more media chatter than the Japanese Earthquake and the uprising in Egypt. Then, less than 48 hours after the newly minted Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had headed off on their honeymoon weekend, came the news about Obama Bin Laden – killed in Pakistan.

The news was first leaked on Twitter by Keith Urbahn, a former staffer under President George W Bush. But the story first started to unfold when an IT consultant, Sohaib Athar posted real-time Twitter complaints bout noisy helicopters hovering over his home town of Abbottabad in Pakistan. His tweets were to provide the background to the attack that killed Bin Laden and his fascinating timeline can be seen in full on TechCrunch. Within seconds the social web was buzzing with questions and speculation, a full 90 minutes before President Obama made his official address. That address was also streamed live by The White House and on Facebook, with aftermath and related social media chatter causing a bigger traffic spike that the Royal Wedding.

If anyone still needed convincing that social media was the most effective tool for spreading news, information and sentiment about what’s happening in the world. these two global historic events should have done the job.

This might sound funny but it’s a question we hear from time to time at SHO. Once somone has come to us with a project, that’s based on a great and original idea, we can design everything they need to make that project a reality. But the plan that takes that idea and all our work and actually makes it happen sometimes gets lost.

The simple answer is to have a marketing plan. That will define the insights and outline strategy to inform our designs and give the project structure. Sometimes that’s not available (not everyone has access to marketing resources) and we can help and advise the strategy for the marketing through things like competitor analysis and customer touchpoints.

To get the best from graphic design though, it really does help to have a marketing plan. This article has some helpful tips and a few pointers we use ourselves:

Simple steps to a marketing plan ››

The answer was quite interesting. It’s a mix of social media and updates to the search patterns of the big search engines. OK (yawn) very interesting indeed. But it is, honest, and it has more relevance for graphic design than you might expect.

As social networking has become more popular the type of content on the Internet has changed, people are able to post real time information. What’s happening right now.

Combined with this the main search engines now display live content just like the content from sites submitted and evaluated. The result is that Twitter posts and Facebook pages can get just as much prominence as dedicated webpages, sometimes more because of the way they work and how they’re built. Useful information if you’re working in graphic design and web design.

On the web content is king after all. To find out more check out this article:

Real Time Search