Holistic design for new business start-ups

Holistic design?
Web pages and printing are just part of what we call in the trade ‘presence’. Nothing spooky going on here, we’re just stepping back and looking at the big picture from a holistic perspective. An holistic design will only work well if all the components are working together. Here’s a summary…

Printed matter
Starting with the corporate design (logo, fonts colours, image use etc) you can benchmark your companies ‘presence’ in the media world and extend that ‘look and feel’ into every aspect of your marketing strategy.

Your logo design will appear on virtually all elements of design from business cards to brochures, websites to social media; so this key design asset has to be right for you and for how it is going to be used (media platforms).

also see corporate design

The holistic aspect is to try and achieve an all encompassing media philosophy for your business by ensuring all the components are in place, enforced and policed so that wherever your company is represented it not only looks professional but the designs can be completed by any professional without confusion, delay and minimal briefing.

The greater part of business ‘presence’ today is on the internet as traditional print media continues to decline. Recently this move towards a stronger web presence has been compounded by the Covid19 epidemic.

What is a website?
For the browser, it’s the visual experience of seeing content, ie: images, text, animation, links; the human view but is it the most important? If you’re a search engine, it’s coding that makes the web page work, especially some of the coding content identified by search engines and cached for future searches.

Where are websites?
In most cases your first visual experience of a website will be a search result on a search engine, most likely Google (also see: Google SEO). So the first impression is a results page is a ‘snippet’, if this isn’t set up correctly or not in place at all you’re already out of the picture.

 

Web name choice?
Is it not a good idea to have a .co.uk web name for a .co.uk search engine?
Should there be keywords in a web name?
Spaces (-) between the web name words so a search engine can read who you are?

Choosing the right web name is an important decision and can impact on your search results and how humans look for you on search engines.

Web site hosting
If you’re a UK business your hosting should be in the UK simply because search engines know where your website is in the world. A lot of the low cost on-line web solutions are based on overseas servers. Search engines will think you’re a non-UK website and reduce your position in preference to UK hosted sites.

How are people seeing your web pages?
Desktop PC, laptop, tablet, mobile phones….Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari…4G, 5G, WiFi – perm any of these to achieve about 75% correct, your web pages have to be completely ‘responsive’ for all scenarios and future proof as the www changes over time. That’s why OHM use WordPress, the world’s most popular web design service.

Web page design
The human experience once the potential customer has found your web pages (with all the above in place) will influence their concept of your business, the key design elements being

• page layout
• menu
• image use
• text use
• fonts
• colours
• animation
• videography

Putting a nice design together with a balance of content (for all devices to view) is the holy grail of web design. We’ve all seen the website with too much text or low quality imagery, a difficult to navigate menu, ghastly colours, poor spelling and grammar, badly designed logo – they all send a negative feel about your business.

In summary, the holistic approach to web design is to consider all elements of your web presence, work hard to get them all right and you have a perfect website.