Branding the new Web Site

Had a strange couple of days. Friday my son had the day off school, so I made it a short day so we could spend some time together. Today has been up and down, and everything I did took 10 times longer than I thot it should, but looking back I did get some things done. These are some of the reason's I'm pursuing an on-line business: you get to see your results (and failures), and the flexibility is wonderful.

In any case, I scribbled down a few of my next steps on friday, and tackled the first two over the past few days.

Overall, my objective the past 2 days was to work up the skeleton for a reasonably nice web site (IE start to develop a brand) that I wouldn't be embarassed to put my name to.

Step 1: was to create a couple of logos
- a Boundless Thinking logo (my company name)
- a Boundless Thinking web header
- a Customer Satisfaction Guarantee logo
- an Internet Integrity logo (purely a branding exercise that illustrates an important personal value)

Step 2: craft a web template to make it easy to add and post things going forward. Major objectives were:
- clean look and feel
- use of text styles that are easily changable to facilitate future split testing in the future (I.E. that's where you try red headings one week and green headings the next week to see what people respond to the most - this is a exercise in developing effective advertising copy. I'm sure I'll be writing more about that as I go along)
- link it to my Boundless Thinking Blog articles (which are hopefully the start of a book)

I've posted an archive of the site so you can see where I started from even after I change the site in the future. It's not perfect, but I think its a very workable start: http://boundlessthinking.com/oldversions/Mar12,2007/index.html

I did everything here myself, but I also found a couple sites that do very good work based on their portfolios. When I get round to polishing this up, there's a very good chance I'll go to these guys:

Logo Design: http://thelogocompany.net/
Header Design: http://www.minisitegraphics.com/

I've also found that there are a lot of freelance work auction sites out there if you need web design or programming done. If I ever use one, I'll let you know how that works out. You can google "freelance programming" or "freelance design" and get a long list of these sites. Be sure to ask for some reference work before you choose a vendor, there are both very good and very bad designers out there. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

That's it for today.