The Goal
Sharon Vickery came to us at first for advice on her branding; she’d had a set of logos designed and wanted our advice on which would be the best choice. Once the logo was selected, the next step was creating a complete redesign of the old site that better incorporates the new brand styling. Aside from the styling, Sharon also needed to reorganise the site’s structure to better emphasise the core services being offered, and also put her face onto the site in a way the old, mostly-text layout didn’t.
What did we do?
We consulted on the logo to start, analysing the logos already created to find the one that best reflected the business while also considering which would give the best flexibility when creating the broader styling for the website and any future artwork created. Once a logo had been selected, the next step was the website plan. We reorganised the site structure and layout from the existing site into something clearer, focused on Sharon and the business’ core services, giving us a strong foundation to build the website design on top of.
For the design, we focused on bringing out the colourful yet refined style of the new branding as a contrast to the very plain previous branding. The watercolour aesthetic from the new logo was utilised throughout the design, helping to give it a cohesive feeling with the rebrand as well as better fitting the target audience. As part of the rebranding process, the client had a photoshoot done. We made sure to make good use of these photos throughout the site to give it more personality, alongside complimenting stock imagery for anything service-specific that the photoshoot didn’t cover.
SEO Transfer
Before we set the new website live, we carried out a full SEO check to ensure that everything on her old website was carried across, so that the SEO rankings that had been built up over the years were maintained.
This included a full review of the new site compared to the old site to ensure all elements like meta titles, descriptions, H1 tags, page content, and image alt tags from her old website were carried over. We then reviewed the old website in Google Search Console to check for any keywords it was ranking for that we needed to carry over to the new site to maintain the rankings.
Once we were sure everything was carried over to the new site and the rankings would be maintained, we checked over the sitemap and XML sitemap to ensure all pages were listed, so website visitors and Google know what is included on the site.
We also made sure to match the URLs of the pages to the ones on the old site where possible and added redirects where it wasn’t; this prevents anywhere that might have a link to pages on the old website from leading to a ‘missing page’ error now that the new site is launched and it no longer exists or has been moved to a new part of the site.
It’s time to launch
Once we’d combed through the website for any errors, missing content or issues at different screen sizes and fixed any that arose, we were ready for launch.
If you want to see the new website, you can take a look here.
If you’re thinking about a website redesign, or want to discuss any other functionalities on your website, contact us today, and we will be more than happy to help you.