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LogoPro Web Redesign

Here is one of our very first design roughs, when we thought scrolling images on the side bar would be a good idea. You can see elements of the design in the design we have now. But thankfully we ditched the dark background, a colour we started with back in 2001.

We started to work on a new design for LogoPro in 2007 – the new site went ‘live’ in March 2011. Four years may sound a long time to give a website a new look. Here is an insight into the thinking, the designing and the effort that went into that journey.

From the beginning we had 3 packages. The site was designed in the days when credit cards were given names to differentiate them, names like Gold and Platinum. Along the same vein, we chose to call our packaged Business Class, Business Plus and Business Advantage. They were on the home page as colour text links and could easily go unnoticed. Web design wisdom says ‘call to action’, make it super easy to buy your product or service. Every extra click it takes to buy is potentially a click away from your site.

Did we still need 3 packages? After careful consideration, yes we do, people like simple choices. We have invented new packages and called them economy, extra and elite.  We have separated out the confusing options on stationery design and concentrated on the difference between the logo design service offered and the flexibility of the final logo files. So our 3 packages needed to be clear, concise and obvious on the front page, where you could buy with one click, 2 clicks absolute max.

We spent hours working on our navigation, we recognise that if navigation is confusing, we have lost the game. Keeping it simple had to be balanced with making it obvious where you can get to, to display all the services we had to offer. Initially we roughed out ideas that would show all the pages, it took a lot of valuable space and our viewer would be faced with a bundle of words – would they be bothered to read? Possibly not, so our navigation was put in the obvious place (generally a good plan) with drop down menus with simple page names that would work at just a glance.

As any blogger knows, writing articles takes a lot of time and energy, looking for inspiration, doing the research and writing the article.  Surprisingly the commitment to share this experience is enjoyable and I will continue.