I’m looking forward to the future with great excitement – meeting and working with the many small businesses and organisations in the locality as we team up to produce the best in web sites, e-commerce, blogs, branding and social media consulting. (I’m also hoping to keep my blog just a little more up to date!)

Hoping to catch up with soon – feel free to send me an email or call for a chat about your online promotional needs.

A new logo

Peter also requested a new logo. We decided on something with a resort feel because we wished to connect with many in the Cove’s market (not that you’d really call Freshwater Cove a “resort” in the sense that most of us think of a resort). However we also wanted the image to convey the vast antiquity of the region and reflect Peter’s profound connection with the land and the local Traditional Owners, the Worrworra people.

We came up with a nice primitive feel to the logo. Whilst we didn’t want to produce a pale imitation of indigenous art, we drew in elements of style which acknowledge or echo the works of these people which are now globally famous. The primitive fish describes the Raison d’être of Freshwater Cove and the surrounding stars, in the style of indigenous artists, reminds one of the remoteness of the site: a place where millions of stars appear as if at one’s fingertips each night (a scene which few in the city ever enjoy).

A captivating site

The site itself is an eye-grabbing fusion of primitive and clean and modern. It features beautiful imagery displayed in Flash banners with sophisticated and highly appealing transitions. The rich ochre colours reflect the Kimberley landscape. The entire site reeks of enticement.

Keeping the content management simple

It was important to Peter that he be able to manage the site content, as he needed to keep his booking schedule in order on a day to day basis. Peter will be the first to tell you that he’s much more at home baiting a hook than updating web sites, so we packed the gorgeous design into a custom WordPress format, making it dead easy for Peter to maintain a news page, update his image gallery and stay on top of his booking schedule. Please view this site, but beware, you too may feel inspired to make your own trip to the Cove soon.

Hidden costs

IT’S BEEN a difficult path to walk, as I have a problem with just about every content management system on the market. First, they are not easy to learn to manage (no matter what the sales team tell you), which presents a number of problems, including businesses losing staff for the course of several training sessions – expensive training sessions. Then, when that staff member leaves, their replacement must also go through the same course – again with the same expenditure and down time.

It’s also time consuming to implement the inevitable upgrades and this can create considerable expenses again. The sites based on various Content Management Systems (CMS) typically cost several thousand dollars to implement, so all of these expenses on top of an already expensive site produce a considerable financial impost on a small business which is in effect only trying to buy an advertisement or a window-shopping device. Oh yeah, your staff will have to attend more training sessions when you upgrade.

Inflexible structures

MY NEXT ISSUE is the template system employed by CMS sites. It is crucial that your website be designed to reflect your business in a way that is appealing to your target market. Failure to do this is likely to greatly reduce the effectiveness of a key investment in the success of your business.

I can spot a template-based site immediately: it simply looks like the content has been jammed into a design which is entirely generic. This breaks the first principle of web design: the content must dictate the design, not the other way around.

By their very nature, the built in complexity of CMS sites also permit fiddling in areas where people who aren’t web designers should never go. The result are web sites which look like an amateur has built but have cost you more to purchase and maintain than the average professionally designed and webmastered site. Let’s face it: you are only going to look as professional as your web site.

An affordable, workable solution

INTO THIS scenario comes WordPress. WordPress is a blogging tool, designed to be incredibly easy to post to, but having all the functions which most websites demand. It has the added functionality of being incredibly flexible in nature, which means that it can be reconfigured to take on almost any appearance and structure that a designer fancies. View my most recent implementation. WordPress ticks the boxes which most small business are concerned with:

• WordPress has the flexibility which enables us to build sites where the content dictates the design, so small businesses can get their message out most effectively.
• It takes less than an hour to show a user how to handle every function and eventuality of maintaining a WordPress site and my customers always exclaim at the end of training “Is that all there is?”. If you can use an email system, you can update and manage a website built in WordPress.

WordPress isn’t the answer to everyone’s needs but I find it a powerful option for small businesses who can’t afford the time to chase busy webmasters (us) for small changes which must take place on a regular basis and who can’t afford the time and money to implement other CMS. I’ll be featuring some examples of our work in this growing segment of the business in coming posts.

There’s been pages and even entire sites dedicated to describing what makes a good logo and many hit the mark. For me, the recipe is simple. A logo must:

• be unique
• represent the company’s or organistion’s activities, culture and market
• have an element of cleverness which captivates the viewer, creating a memorable representation and reinforcing the uniqueness
• work in the horizontal and vertical
• be reversible.

A logo might need a number of other features, but it must have the above, or it won’t leave my hard drive. So when a customer from a wetland reconstruction and environmental trust requests a logo which must feature a swan, a certain level of trepidation creeps into my life: How does one depict a swan which wont look like the hundreds of other swan logos that are out there – both sitting on the water and in flight?

After a few days of struggling with various permutations of swans and staggering around in that mist, at 4:00 am on day four, everything began to fall into place: The idea of depicting a swan against reeds in a manner where the reeds comprised the background, with a swan appearing from out of them. It seems obvious, but it always is after the fact and arriving there in a manner which fulfills my above three criteria takes time.

Putting the elements together

The basic swan element

The first job was to bite the bullet and produce a nice, elegant swan which doesn’t look like any other logo image. A simplified shape can look like a number of logos that are already out there.

I opened Adobe Illustrator and soon found myself chucking out many permutations and styles – of floating and flying swans before getting down to the core elegance of the bird in understated simplicity. Creating an elegant and unique neck and head helps to keep the image a little original. It’s placement – in reverse – on the reeds will greatly contribute to the uniqueness.

The background of reeds

The next task was to create a background comprised of reeds, but nothing too detailed – just vertical lines, as detailed reeds would have made the image overly complex and made it difficult to reduce to smaller sizes. It would also have made the image more of an illustration and less of a unique emblem.

The altered density of the lines produces balance between the black and the white but will also give the effect of the swan appearing out of them in the finished logo.

Making it “real”

The problem here is how to make a series of vertical lines unequivocally represent reeds. So far our logo has the swan element and it’s nicely imposed in reverse against the reed background. However, it’s going to take a certain level of smarts to produce the “clever” aspect of the logo which brings the concepts together and creates a memorable image.

The logo so far looked too rigid and geometric, by bending one of the vertical reed elements a reed is immediately suggested, especially in association with the swan. This suggestion is powerful enough to turn the remaining vertical elements into reeds.

A little trimming and the addition of a simple sans serif logotype and the result is a perfect little logo for representing an environmental trust working to preserve one of Australia’s most iconic wetlands.

The logo also works well in reverse . . .

. . . and in the vertical.