I’m Stuck with a Bad Logo — Now What?

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Way back when you started your busi­ness you didn’t have a lot of money, so you cut a few cor­ners on your logo. Either you designed it your­self (and you’re not a designer) or you bought a pre-made logo from one of those $99 logo web­sites or pos­si­bly you hired your cousin’s sister-in-law’s kid ’cause she’s “good at art and stuff”.

What do you do?
Hav­ing a bad logo will def­i­nitely hold you back when you’re look­ing to take your busi­ness to the next level. You may not even real­ize you have a bad logo, but you find that you can’t seem to gain trac­tion with your brand.

There are two approaches to chang­ing your logo, each with their own mer­its and challenges.

The first is to toss the old one and start from scratch. The advan­tage to this approach is you get the strong, tar­geted logo you wanted right away (assum­ing you hired a good designer).

The prob­lem with this is that maybe you have a lot of clients who won’t rec­og­nize you when they see that new, splashy, com­pletely dif­fer­ent logo from the one you had. With this approach, you’ll also need to launch a cam­paign to exist­ing cus­tomers telling them all about your new look. And depend­ing on what you offer, you may need to reas­sure them with copy like, “brand new look, same great service.”

Depend­ing on how big your com­pany is or if your reach is wide, this could be an expen­sive endeavor. You might need to send a printed direct mail piece in advance let­ting them know about the upcom­ing change, and fol­low up with a sec­ond after the launch. You’ll want to announce it in emails and on your web­site and on your Face­book page if you have one. You might even need to include new tv and radio spots, if you’ve adver­tised there in the past.

The sec­ond option is if you have a good idea, but a bad, or dated look­ing exe­cu­tion. You can evolve this type of logo over time, mak­ing small changes over the course of a year or sev­eral years. This solu­tion doesn’t require the big announce­ment and expense of the first option, but it requires patience and an ongo­ing rela­tion­ship with your designer.

When is a bad logo a good thing
Does your logo look dated and cheap? If you’re in the dis­count busi­ness, or sell cheap prod­ucts, a bad, dated logo can actu­ally help you. That’s because it’s con­vey­ing just how cheap you are, which is what we call a sell­ing feature.

Ulti­mately, you don’t have to put up with a bad logo. The sooner you change it the sooner you can start build­ing and posi­tion­ing your brand exactly where you want it.

Is Your Website Keeping Pace With Your Business?

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As your busi­ness grows and evolves, so should your web­site. The site you put up 5 or even 2 years ago may not reflect what you’re com­pany is doing today.

When I first began build­ing web­sites, I was keen on a sta­tic page that would look and feel like a print piece. But unlike print pieces, web­sites are around for a long time. And if you aren’t a large com­pany with a full time web team, it might be dif­fi­cult to keep your web­site on pace with­out spend­ing a lot of money. Today I forgo tra­di­tional web­site build­ing tools for web plat­forms like Word­Press and Ning, that let com­pa­nies add and delete fea­tures eas­ily and seam­lessly as busi­ness requires, sav­ing them both time and money.

Don’t know if your web­site is keep­ing pace? If you don’t know, it prob­a­bly isn’t. Take this quiz to see if you need to update your website:

Does your con­tent reflect the prod­ucts or ser­vices your busi­ness offers?

Are you uti­liz­ing tools that let you keep in touch with and engage your customers?

Are the images cur­rent and fresh?

Do your graph­ics reflect the tastes of your tar­get cus­tomer or client?

Can poten­tial cus­tomers find your site via Google and other major search engines?

If you answered no to any of these ques­tions, then it’s time to get cur­rent with your web­site. At Shim­min Design, we can help you move your site to a plat­form that will keep pace and evolve as both tech­nol­ogy and your com­pany evolves. We can inte­grate tools that will help you stay in touch with clients and poten­tial cus­tomers, show off your lat­est accom­plish­ments, share media, and so much more. Con­tact us today for a free esti­mate, or to get started.

What is SEO and Why Should I Care?

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I often get clients who want a web­site built and when I start talk­ing to them about SEO, they glaze over. They just want a web­site. And from it, more business.

SEO stands for Search Engine Opti­miza­tion and sim­ply put, it’s what gets your web­site found on Google, Yahoo, Bing and the like. If you want your cus­tomers to find you online, you need it.

SEO is part art, part sci­ence. Search engines are con­tin­u­ously cat­a­loging the inter­net. Each has its own unique algo­rithm that places empha­sis on dif­fer­ent parts of your web­site to best serve up what their users are look­ing for. Know­ing what’s impor­tant to search engines, what’s impor­tant to your poten­tial clients and the lan­guage to express it is key to good SEO.

Build­ing in SEO

There are many ele­ments that go into cre­at­ing good SEO. This is by no means a com­plete list, but the basics include:

  • Your URL
  • Site title
  • Page title
  • Head­ings, used in descend­ing order
  • Links in and out
  • Image titles, descrip­tions and alter­nate text
  • Size of your website
  • Unique con­tent
  • Con­tent freshness
  • Key­words and meta data

Some of your SEO is buried in your code, but most of it is vis­i­ble to the viewer. When cre­at­ing good SEO you need to think like your poten­tial customer.

For exam­ple, if your com­pany is called Per­snick­ety Painters and some­one keys Per­snick­ety Painters into Google, your web­site is going to come up on top. But what if some­one who’s never heard of you wants to find a top qual­ity painter in San Fran­cisco, CA? They’re going to key in ‘house painter in San Fran­cisco, CA’ or some such phrase. Your job is to antic­i­pate what your cus­tomer is going to key in, and have a page ready that meets their search requirements.

That means your site title might be San Francisco’s Top Qual­ity House Painter: Per­snick­ety Painters. And your home page might include a tes­ti­mony by a client stat­ing that Per­snick­ety Painters offered the best qual­ity house paint­ing for the price on their home in San Francisco.

Next, as the owner of Per­snick­ety Painters, you would cre­ate a Face­book page and a Twit­ter account for the busi­ness with links to that page.

To keep con­tent fresh, you’d include a blog and post reg­u­larly about the lat­est homes you painted in San Fran­cisco, CA.

And so on…

Choos­ing the right lan­guage and express­ing it through­out your site is key to cre­at­ing good SEO. It’s what brings you new busi­ness. And isn’t that what every busi­ness owner wants?

Need SEO help? Shim­min Design offers basic SEO with your web­site design and part­ners with SEO experts when in-depth SEO is required.