The small corporate web site

By adhering to a few simple design guidelines, the small to micro-sized business can create a corporate brand and feel on and offline for a fraction of the price paid by the blue chips.

So how is this conjuring trick achieved?

By taking a step back and viewing our web sites not isolation, but as part of our overall marketing strategy. At its most basic level this is deciding on a colour scheme and sticking to it. Not only that, but also being consistent across the board, on letterheads, fax headers, stationery, vehicles, premises and web site. Likewise with fonts, graphics and logos – pick and stick. By adopting a uniform approach across all media – print, web, etc. – you’ll be establishing before long an instantly recognisable brand.

You may be well on the way to doing this already. So the cost needn’t be prohibitive, and can be phased in if it’s a case of merely tightening up design when placing the next order of stationery.

A typical example might be a company selling gourmet smoked salmon. It already has a distinctive graphic logo but is not consistent on the font it uses for the company name. The sign at the premises is a bold blocky typeface, black on white. Adverts in the press tend to have the company name in Arial Narrow, magazines with their higher resolution printing has the company name in a curly Celtic font, and the web uses a smaller version of the logo, the company name in Arial Bold and the text Verdana.

Meanwhile, the large display advert the company has commissioned for the airport features a professionally photographed platter of smoked salmon against a backdrop of light oatmeal coloured Harris Tweed and subtle, warm and earthy shades of light brown. (Goodness, all this is making me feel hungry).

Back on the web, the site looks bright and breezy, cold, sparkling water bubbles away merrily in the background and centre stage a leaping salmon breaches and curves in its attempt to get upstream.

Talk about mixed messages. What a burach!

So what to do?

First of all, let’s rationalise the marketing effort here. The airport advert made a hole in the marketing budget, so let’s lever the maximum out of the investment and all that expensive photography. The airport advert prominently displayed our web address, of course, so let users arriving on the home page recognise it as ours instantly. We do this by ditching the leaping salmon et al and bringing in the gourmet platter, the light oatmeal Harris Tweed and the earthy brown tones. We want visitors to immediately recall the airport advert and perceive the web site as the online interactive version. Ideally, we want the visual cues to propel our name into the minds of viewers before they have even read the text.

Web site make over complete, it’s on to the rest of the marketing effort. Our vehicle fleet’s due for replacement soon, so let’s go for our corporate colour scheme of earth brown, with light oatmeal Harris Tweed, the platter and company name.

By now, we’ve plumped for Verdana bold in black; it’s a sharp, clean font and web friendly. This is now the mandatory font for the company name across all media, whether it is vehicles, magazine or newspaper advertising.

Every quarter our imaginary gourmet smoked salmon company places a stationery order. Only this time there’s a radical overhaul. In comes our by now corporate look and feel for everything we get printed from business cards to fax headers to invoices and receipts.

Now, this didn’t all happen overnight. With forward planning and attention to detail, a Rolls Royce branding exercise was achieved for the price of a Ford Fiesta.