Our Approach to Design and Branding.

Brand Development:

Many people think branding is all about designing logos, tag lines and product packaging. The fact is that branding goes far, far deeper. It is about winning and keeping a place in your customer’s mind. It is a valuable corporate asset. Your brand should be helping you grow your business. That is why you need to understand it, manage it and develop its full potential.

Unfortunately most brands suffer from lack of attention. Many are not kept in alignment with market changes, many are not differentiated and many are just plain tired. That’s where our Branding process comes in.

Brand development is how we shape what people think of us. We have developed a high-impact, low-cost branding program that starts with getting a clear understanding of what your customers think of you today and ends with a clearly defined strategy for owning your place in your customer’s mind.

Our 3 step approach to brand development includes:

1) Marketing Studies: We start by evaluating a company’s marketing strategy: price, products/services and position in the market. This study helps us select appropriate colors, imagery and symbols that make the best possible impact on the company’s target market.

2) Customer and Competitive Research: We also need to know what your target customers think of you or if they even do think of you. We look at your competitors’ marketing collateral: websites, brochures and sales support material. This research provides a benchmark and allows us to differentiate your company from the competition.

3) Concept Development: We create a series of creative renderings to stimulate thought and discussion as your leadership team works with us to shape the brand and image of the company. Stakeholder feedback is critical as we progress in the design process.

Our approach to web design is the process of taking branding standards to web format.

Our approach to web design is broken into three phases: Documentation, Design, and HTML Development.

1) Documentation: Gathering good requirements up front saves everyone time and money and improves the overall quality of the solution. We are committed to making sure our final solution meets all of your needs. It is critical to discover and document those needs before we start, rather than being forced to retrofit missed requirements into the solution after the fact. We will work with you to create specific documentation of business functionality requirements and a design to ensure a mutual understanding of the design required before the coding phase begins. This approach will confirm our understanding of your objectives and streamline development by minimizing change orders and recoding.

2) Design, home page mock-up and website theme: Our design team will produce a theme for the front and the inner pages that will readily communicate the nature of the site and your business. The tone, manner and personality of our designs will be confident, reliable, helpful, and customer-focused. All graphic and navigational elements will be finalized during this phase.

3) HTML, CSS and programming phase: After you are 100% satisfied with the design mocks provided in graphic form we begin the html phase. It is important to note that our websites use Cascading Style Sheets and design standards based on W3C standards. W3C develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential.

We are committed to designing websites and Web-based applications that are accessible. “Accessible” means to a wide range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning difficulties, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech difficulties, and others We follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

To learn more about W3C, visit its website at: https://www.w3.org/

Web Design Guidlines:

Our designers will ensure the success of your website by following these design guidelines:

• Reviewing and testing your website in all the major browsers
Your final design will be compatible with Windows and Macintosh platforms and current versions of Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, and IE browsers.

• Optimizing your site for various screen resolutions
We test your design and make sure it looks good at a screen resolution of 800 X 600. This is the lowest resolution that manufacturers specify for most computer monitors.

• Ease of Navigation
Navigation is one of the key components of a successful website design. Visitors that use your site should be able to find exactly what they are looking for without extensive searching and wasted time.

• Optimized for search engine rankings
High ranking websites include all relevant key words in the Meta-tags and throughout the copy of the website. One of our goals during each engagement is to create and implement Internet marketing strategies to generate new business through search engine optimization.

• Aesthetically pleasing
We can follow your corporate style specifications including your company’s corporate colors, font treatment, and logo usage or can recommend an entirely new Brand image for your company. We understand that key word frequency on a website is critical in search engine optimization while the artistic use of empty space and images is a critical factor in creating an aesthetically pleasing website. The key is to strike an appropriate balance between basic graphic design principals and business functionality.

• Content rich
The best web sites are rich with content and updated on a regular basis with current service offerings, press releases, and events. We will work with you to make this a priority.

• Capture Valuable Marketing Data
Good websites prompt visitors to provide valuable marketing data. We will help you use your website and an interactive marketing tool to generate new business and communicate with your existing clients.