If you are looking to get onboard with Facebook for business, you’re going to need to make sure your Facebook page looks the business and is aligned with your branding and design language. The new Facebook timeline layout offers real opportunity to develop content to engage with customers and showcase your brand. The new ‘featured image’ at the top of the page is an obvious place to showcase your brand, but beware Facebook does make a point of asking that it’s not used for promotional purposes e.g. special offers etc. However, how Facebook actually police that is not yet known!

Another great new feature is the ability to pin posts to the top of your timeline. This gives you the power to customise the user experience for a new or returning visitor. For example, you may have posted about an award you won, or a new product range launch back in September, but now you can pin that post to the top of your page, which has obvious benefits.

The timeline also places greater emphasis on the activity of a user’s friends/colleagues/customers towards a page. If they have expressed an opinion or have ‘liked’ your page or a post, then it will be visible at the top of the page. This feature helps to provide a more personal experience for users and opens up great potential for future referral business.

If you don’t already have a Facebook profile for your business, then now with timeline it’s a great opportunity to get onboard the Social media bandwagon and open up this new and exciting opportunity to build your brand, engage with customers and increase your sales through referral marketing.

Here’s a fun example of a Facebook page banner we recently created that follows corporate branding - www.facebook.com/findmeatradesperson or visit our very own Facebook page, which we recently launched (new banner image in progress and coming soon!) – Visit and like Design Pro on Facebook…

Design Pro can advise and design Facebook pages and assist with all forms of social media and internet marketing to help bring you more customers, engage with existing customers and improve sales. If you want to have a chat, then contact us for more information.

A Little Secret

Our jobs as designers is to think of these questions before presenting something to our clients. I’ll let you in on a little secret, that really shouldn’t be much of a secret at all: content is king, and design will never dethrone it. We live in a world where ideas sell, and everyone is buying. Because content is so crucial, here are a couple of guidelines to keep in mind: Starting with something good, something that will make other people think, “I wish I had thought of that.” is so important. A lot of this comes back to what I mentioned in a previous blog – the brand. If you get your messaging right, everything else will flow through the brand and communicate a powerful, succinct tone-of-voice. A message that will stand up on it’s own. Design just helps deliver the final blow!

A great concept or great idea is only half the battle. Products that are aesthetically engaging but that do not have engaging content are quickly forgotten. Products that are promoted far more than they should be will often run their course and fade out much more quickly than the time they took to create.

Brains and Beauty

If you can deliver beauty AND brains in your communications, then you will be well positioned for success. Content is most certainly King and defines the brief of most creatives projects we do. I like to think ‘design is the sword’ and ‘brand the armour’. If you go into battle well equipped and with a strategy, you’ll slay the opposition far easier.

Design Pro has a long standing relationship with Philip Jones, a Chartered Marketer and excellent copywriter. If you’d like a meeting with us to discuss how best to articulate your proposition and how to align USPs and key messaging with your brand, please contact: mark@designproltd.com or call 0117 9570 931

A brand is the definition of what a business is: what it represents and stands for, it’s core values, and how it should be perceived by customers. It is about how your customers feel about the business and what they say to others about it. A brand also demonstates core values, messaging, tone of voice and the outward facing image portrayed to customers.

Defining a brand involves creating a unique (if possible) name for the business. But it goes much deeper than that, it should flow into the office design, the way the phone is answered, the way your staff dress and ultimately the manor in which business is conducted. If staff know the core values of the business and understand what the brand stands for, then staff become more loyal to the company and will act in a consistent manor inline with the business ethos. Internal branding is as important as outward facing branding as it means all your staff push in the same direction and get right behind the business.

So what role does the actual logo design play? Well, it is simply the core visual element of the brand. It’s the face of the brand. A logo helps customers identify with a business and it’s products and/or services. Using shapes, colours and style it gives customers a quick sneak preview of what a business stands for. The logo helps make up customers minds about the business and influences their perception before they’ve ever stepped foot through the door, or shook the hand of a company representative, done business with you or tried your products. So, I think it would be fair to say a logo is pretty influential!

If the business model is strong, consistent and implemented well, then a well aligned brand should compliment and engage customers. However, the messaging, values and tone all need to be considered. But the most important thing is the customer. If you target the right customers with the right message and the right products or services then success is just a small step away!

We’ve recently conducted a number of branding exercises for customers, which you can view in our ‘case studies‘ section. Speak to us about how we can help your business with branding and logo design.
Contact Mark Probert mark@designproltd.com or call 0117 9570 931.

With so many online e-commerce website platforms available today, it’s very difficult for customers to decide what’s the right option for their business, especially if you don’t have a crystal ball, as you just don’t know how the online business will operate or how successful it may become.

Whilst some proprietary web systems can look great value on the face of it, don’t forget that if the price looks good, it is often too good to be true. It’s not until you get using an e-commerce web system that you might discover that it comes up short. For example, with a proprietary system, ask the development company to change the system to suit your business, or add functionality that is missing and you’ll either get an outright “no, that’s not possible” or a large bill for the work.

For some custom development or an entry level system like WordPress wp-commerce, might be a better option. However, every customer situation is different, so a one size fits all approach doesn’t work in the long term. It’s important that customers understand that choosing a supplier on cost alone is not ideal. Until both parties invest the time to fully understand the project requirements in detail, it’s near impossible to specify functionality (or fixed budgets).

We inherit so many customers that come to us because they have been left disappointed by their previous developers. To avoid disappointment customers really need to invest in a consultancy approach before they commission a developer. I always urge customers to undertake an architecture phase, which is a small up-front billable workshop, followed by a full specification and strategy report. This approach avoids any room for disappointment or frustration, whilst providing both parties with the opportunity to see how they work together before the customer commits to the full project.

For the majority of retail customers I personally recommend Magento as a serious e-commerce solution. If you think your business has the potential to do £150k revenue and upwards within 12-18 months, then we urge customers to consider investing extra funds in a system like Magento from day one.

Magento is a complicated system from a web development aspect, but the functionality you get out of the tin is vast and can’t be matched by other systems. As Magento is Open-Source, it has a vast community of developers meaning if you decide to move developers later on, then you won’t be left high and dry like with many proprietary systems that have locked you in. The other advantage to Open-Source is the array of plugins, support and ongoing development, not to mention regular security updates that are available for free.

Magento recently introduced a simpler way to create mobile apps and mobile websites using the primary site database. This makes rapid development of these new technologies far quicker and more affordable for customers. Whilst Magento is free, it also offers an enterprise addition for an annual fee which provides additional functionality and support – you can read more about it here – http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/enterprise-level or watch the video -

Search Engine Optimisation is paramount to the success of an ecommerce website. Magento Ecommerce excels here with an intuitive SEO module that allows simple configuration of meta data, along with extremely SEO friendly product URLs.

Integration is also very good using Magento’s API’s and XML modules. So, if you need to hook the system up to a stock control, accounts, email marketing or CRM system, then this is also possible with some tinkering under the bonnet.

Remember, when choosing your design or web agency, the trick is finding an agency who has a track record in delivering a return on investment through solid ecommerce business advice and great user experience design. The system and functionality will help you run the business effectively, but it won’t create sales out of thin air! A full service agency approach with a strategic plan, rather than a developer with great coding skills will provide the advise and guidance to make your business a real success.

If you need advise with your e-commerce web design, development, SEO, PPC or email marketing, then please contact us.

If you are new to the graphic design buying process, you can sort of see clients take on it I guess. The customer requires a re-brand – they have a certain budget, they want to get a good idea of the skill sets available, pricing structures and obviously gain an idea about what the creative work is like. So they prepare a design brief, look at some design firms online, call a few numbers, put together a short-list. Then contact the agency with a conversation that starts with “Hi, we have a fantastic opportunity for a local agency to help re-brand our company”. “Oh, and did we mention, for the privilege, we want your initial ideas done for free so we can assess who’s the best”.

Is this a good approach in finding a long-term partnership with a team that they want to work with? Do they really think that graphic design work produced under these conditions is an accurate way to assess who’s the best graphic design agency for their business?

Free pitching is not the best way to choose a design firm. It devalues the process and the industry as a whole and never results in a good working relationship. Not only that, but it also drives up costs in the long run for all the businesses across Bristol and the South West looking to commission creative design work.

Who wants to buy creative work based on just ‘the best design’? Best design for who? And to achieve what?

‘For us, it’s all about ROI. Understanding the problem and solving it – graphic design is only a part of the solution’.

So, what’s the best way to choose a graphic design agency?

Here at Design Pro, we prefer to run initial workshops to prove to potential customers that we understand their business, their customers and more importantly the problem they are looking to solve.

We find that talking is far more important in the early stages of developing the brief than any creative work, no matter how good it looks on face value. All too often clients think they know what the problem is, so jump straight into producing the brief and sourcing a creative input. This often results in the wrong strategy being applied and messaging that misses the mark.

With a strategy workshop/meeting customers save themselves time and effort and discover;
A. Can these guys help us
B. Do they fully understand our business
C. Do they have the ideas and experience
D. Do we think we’d get on and enjoy the process with these people

Our advice

If you need a well thought out solution, from a thought provoking company who can help drive your marketing , then sit down for a morning over a coffee and talk. It’s better for everyone I promise!

How do you tackle these increasing number of variables? Well for many it’s about picking the main players for their target market – Blackberry users for business, ipad and iphone for consumers, or perhaps Android for a middle market. Either way you’re still compromising and gambling on what is, or going to become, the platform of choice for your customers.

Developing bespoke apps for each platform is expensive and restrictive for many reasons. That’s why many companies have chosen to design and develop mobile optimised websites. They look, feel and behave like an app, the text size is easy to read and load speeds are optimised for 3G. Sure there are design and content compromises to be made, so we advise our clients to think about what their customers use their mobiles for when browsing the web. We are currently advising a recruitment company to exclude most of their sales messages on the mobile devise and cut to the chase and provide candidate information and job posts listings with easy to use contact forms. If it’s on a mobile devise – keep it simple is our advise!

However, whilst adding a mobile website is a good solution if you have a desktop optimised site already, in the longer term we will be asking our customers to consider what’s known as ‘responsive web design‘. If you’re looking to update your desktop website design and want to consider mobile and tablets, then a responsive web design could be just the ticket. Unlike many web design companies, we have been using OOCSS (object orientated CSS) for years now. OOCSS means we can manipulate the content of a website to responsively adapt to the resolution and orientation of the screen it is being viewed on. We can also detect the operating system, the devise and even the connection type. This new way of thinking will allow our customers to stay ahead of their competitors and design a website that will be flexible enough to cope with the changes in devise types as technology evolves.

Having an architect look at your house plans before you lay a brick is essential, we believe the same applies to the internet. If you plan your website and consider all the variables upfront, then the final solution will be better for it. We offer clients a website architectural planning session to accompany our marketing, brand and design workshops. These initial sessions make sure both parties consider and fully understand the requirements of the project up-front.

Be flexible and don’t leave your customers disappointed that you haven’t considered them… Get responsive.

Back in the day of film sets and bromides the industry was pretty different. It was an age when a whole industry called reprographics existed (don’t worry this posts not going to become all nostalgic), but I did want to discuss how key skills have disappeared from many modern day graphic designers and many design agencies.

Once direct to plate lithographic printing became common place, reprographics departments completely died out and sadly was never truly replaced.  For all that technology has brought to our lives, when it comes to operating printing presses technology just doesn’t quite cut it when it comes to colour reproduction. In my previous job roles we used to spend many hours setting up trapping and making other technical decisions regarding how the film sets would be output to achieve the desired effect on the press. These days it’s often left to little more than a game of chance for most designers and design agencies.

Many printers these days operate little more than a sausage factory. Online print has soared and the attention to detail has declined. We had a client only last week explain to us how they’d found a great price online in Germany and wanted to place the print order themselves. Now, I don’t know what the finished job looked like. What I do know is that the client spent a fair amount of time liasing with Germany trying to explain what he wanted and what format the file would be supplied in back down the chain to us. Now, I can understand price being important, but it’s not just about price, not even quality (although obviously that does matter), but my point is how many hours did our client spend trying to place the order. It’s like me going into a Japanese restaurant in Tokyo, then trying to order with a menu made up of squiggles and shapes! You just wouldn’t know what your were going to get, or if you’d even like it. And that’s my point.

I still feel that printed brochures should be something that you proudly hand over to a customer knowing that it represents you and your business in the best possible light. The best way to achieving this is by commissioning a design agency to produce an end to end solution.  We have always taken great care to make sure we understand the long term goals of a company before we commission photoshoots or profile images,  let alone specify print. The result of this planning phase is what was expected back in the reprographics era where I learned my trade. And whilst for many quality isn’t always top of the agenda when it comes to print, don’t underestimate how continuity and quality of print reflects on a brand and the company.

Next week I will be driving over the bridge to Cardiff to glance a professional eye over many sheets of paper flying off the press, and I will stay there as long as it takes, until I see my vision matched on paper exactly how I know it should look, and how the client should expect it to look.

Great design is one thing, but great literature design without a knowledge of the end product and how it will be produced is something else. And it is unfortunately something they just don’t teach in any great depth at University these days! When I finally hang up my mouse in about twenty years, I’d like to teach at a University to educate the talented young designers how to make sure their creativity is reproduced effectively in printed materials.

I personally find Googles branding a refreshing change to most corporate branding, or even some consumer branding. Just compare Apple to Google and you’ll see two large corporates with completely different brand values. There was a time when patent lawyers would strongly advise against ever creating more than one variation of a logo, we are constantly creating brand guidelines to prevent our clients deviating from the brand by using white out versions, or placing the logo on different colour backgrounds, or worst still using a completely different font when creating documents or brochures internally.

Yet, in March of this year, the US Patent and Trademark office granted Google a patent for its doodles but, surprisingly, that patent does not cover the individual doodle designs, instead, it relates to the invention of the idea and method of periodically changing the logo to entice people to the website. You might wonder how a company could be granted exclusive rights to the concept of frequently varying its logo, but that seems to be what has happened.

Fluid branding is not a new concept, but as a graphic designer I feel left in the wrong hands it can quickly degrade in quality, and even in Googles case, has at times been left to internal employees with little or no design background. Although the Google brand is probably big enough and strong enough to withstand these variations, it’s not something that I will be advising to our customers when we next take on a new branding project. Most companies have their work cut out to stand themselves apart in this day and age, so deviation and a lack of direction is confusing for customers and will leave people wondering what your company stands for. So, if you’re setting up a business or looking to rebrand I wouldn’t personally consider Google’s approach as one to follow, at-least not until you are the global leader in your sector anyway!

For consistency across the board in your marketing you need to have strong design brand guidelines and need to know your customers well. With a consistent message and image to present you will be far more lightly to achieve a well recognised brand. Only then will your business be equipped for success.

Speak to us about designing clear, concise brand guidelines for your business. It’s a good investment that will add money to your companies re-sell valuation and it will help no end with future marketing and design projects. What’s more, I guarantee it will make your marketing budget go much further in the longer term!

So, we figured that by helping provide solutions to reduce administration we could help our customers market more effectively using cloud web applications. In the last week we’ve seen Hewlett-Packard announce they are getting out of the hardware market to concentrate more on the future of the PC world that is cloud based technologies. This announcement only makes me even more confident that what we are doing here at Design Pro is the future for us and our clients.

Cloud systems aren’t just for the elite blue-chip companies, we’ve been adding additional functionality to websites built on open source systems like the excellent WordPress CMS for years to great effect. Today we are seeing companies use their website platform as their internal system so they can manage both their internal information and their external customer interface from one easy to use cloud based system.

One of the additional benefits is that cloud based systems use internet browsers like Internet Explorer or Firefox which allow quick and secure login from any PC or Mac anywhere in the world, providing greater flexibility as the systems are build on modern day web standards making development time far quicker than in days gone by.

The world’s changing and companies need to consider their options and perhaps ditch their allegiance to Microsoft products and other non-proprietary systems and look to develop bespoke solutions that ‘exactly’ fit their needs now and in the future. It’s affordable to many businesses and it’s the future. And the future is now.

It has taken me a few years to realise that our clients don’t just buy our design services, they buy our expertise across the board to help their companies grow and prosper. What’s more, they buy into our way of thinking, our dynamic attitude to keeping ahead of the rest when it comes to current trends, social media and the latest technologies.

With the economic downturn we’ve had to work harder than ever to convince companies that our full service agency and strategic approach provides a better return than a quick fix investment that’s not properly thought through and commissioned on cost alone. Demonstrating our expertise and convincing decision makers why we are the right people for the job is something we’ve worked hard on in recent years. When presented with the opportunity for a face to face meeting we found we had a great conversion rate.  However, we found our new website alone didn’t fully demonstrate our expertise and creating bespoke proposals just to get on tender list was very labour intensive for us.

So, you can guess what’s coming – I’ve decided we need to practice what we preach and prove our worth – that’s exactly what I hope to achieve with this blog – educate and demonstrate to you all that we are more than just fantastic designers, but we are marketeers, strategists and techies with a true entrepreneurial outlook on the world – that’s what makes us different, that’s our competitive differentiation. And perhaps why you should spare a few minutes now and again reading what we have to say and finding out what’s hot and what’s not in the world of marketing, design and technology.

I hope you enjoy reading our thoughts and if you want to leave comments on our blog posts, then please feel free to start a  conversation and join the debate.