Creating a website that is kind to people and the planet: behind the scenes of our own brand and website refresh
Our new brand and website is live!
It’s been three years since we last updated our brand and website at Alana Jade Studio. A lot has changed in that time – in the business as well on the Squarespace platform.
I had gotten to the point where the website no longer felt in alignment. I wanted to enter 2024 with a fresh look and fresh start, while ensuring that our website is kind to the people using it and to our precious planet.
Here’s an insider’s look into how we made that happen:
01.
Branding refresh
My main goal here was to refresh our existing colour palette to ensure the colour contrast meets Accessibility Standards.
Often overlooked in the branding phase, colour contrast is a key step in creating a kinder experience for anyone interacting with your business and helps to ensure that all types of people can easily use and read your website (and other marketing collateral), no matter their ability.
I dreamed of colour hues that reflect the natural Australian landscape – something that is dear to my heart and that also speaks to our target audience of Australian-based, earth-conscious businesses.
We also wanted to make sure we had a good mix of light and dark colours to give flexibility with layering and creativity on the website, social graphics and client documentation.
I feel our brand team nailed this completely with a rich dark green, light eucalyptus green, soft clay pink and an ivory colour.
o2.
Photography and imagery
Professional photography is a must when it comes to a website refresh. As I’m overseas at the moment, it wasn’t possible for me to have fresh shoot at this time. But I was able to take a number of my professional shots from past shoots and reuse these.
These shots – images of me in my Brisbane home surrounded by my second-hand things, bulk food jars, indoor plants, my working space, cups of tea and images of me in my campervan – still felt right, worked perfectly with my new colour palette and help to tell my brand story well.
As web design is a visual industry, it’s important to give lots of examples of our past client work on the website, providing social proof of my experience as a designer.
To do this, we curated a library of on-brand mockups (from Moyo and Creative Market) that complimented my existing shoot and could be used to showcase past projects that future ideal clients will resonate with.
03.
Copywriting and SEO
I worked with digital marketing strategist (and my sister) Koren Helbig for copywriting.
Koren and I have been working together for the past year (not only on my business but also with several of my other clients) and we’ve been seeing fantastic results by combining Koren’s skills in copywriting and SEO research with my one-week website designs and my design day service.
Up until this point, Alana Jade Studio has largely grown through client-based referrals (which I’m forever grateful for) but I knew it was time to become more discoverable and reach a wider audience through search.
There’s two parts to making your website more discoverable through search engines – best practice website design (that’s my job!) and the actual written content on your website (that’s where Koren comes in!).
To do this, my copy had to be refined and keywords strategically weaved throughout to let Google know exactly who my services are for.
It generally takes about 3-6 months after refining a website to start to see results through SEO. Koren and I have been working together over the last year and I’ve already started to see my rankings for keywords increase and received several new, aligned client enquiries who tell me they found me through Google (something that wasn’t happening before).
The work we’ve been doing is working and I look forward to seeing what happens next year after Google has had time to work its magic on the new site.
04.
Building the website
Once I had all the key pieces for my website in place – branding, photography and copy – I was ready to make the website happen.
I started out by creating a mock-up of the key pages of the website in Adobe XD. This helped me to get clear on how I want to apply my colour palette, the overall feel of the site and what images I would like to use where.
I opted to use our Elle one-week website base design which is ideal for a web design business as it was created specifically for visual creatives and contains the key sections and pages a visual creative business must have on their website.
I also designed and built additional custom sales pages for my unique offerings.
We followed SEO best practices in terms of heading use, page optimisation, page structure and layout to ensure all the great work Koren had done with the copy was enhanced by the design of the site.
And, of course, we followed our design philosophy – kind, calm, minimal design that removes distractions and encourages curiosity – to gently lead the right people on a natural journey to engage with us.
05.
Making our website more inclusive to all
This past year, I’ve made learning about accessibility a top priority, with the desire to ensure that the brands and websites we create are more inclusive for all types of people.
And of course, I wanted to walk my talk on our website as well. I followed best-practice accessibility design standards, including visual colour contrast, heading structures and alt-text on images.
Plus Squarespace is one of the most advanced website providers when it comes to accessibility standards and, after running accessibility checks on all our pages using Google Lighthouse, I’m pleased with our high ratings.
Big thanks to the teachings in Standout Square that have helped me become more aware of accessibility requirements.
06.
Lowering our website carbon footprint
Aiming to keep Alana Jade Studio’s website carbon emissions as low as possible, I decommissioned all old pages and deleted old images and files that were no longer being used.
On our new pages, we strategically used images to showcase our work but didn’t go overboard (more images require more energy to load the pages). And we optimised all images before uploading them to the site to keep them as small as possible.
As always, we aim to craft a customer journey that is streamline and helps our visitors find the information they need quickly, meaning our visitors spend less time online hunting for the information they need – which is kinder to them and also uses less energy overall.
As Squarespace is a closed-source platform, this means that some areas for lowering carbon emissions are outside of our control (I’ll write more about this topic soon).
However, we’ve done our best with what we can do on the platform. And I’m currently in conversation with Reforest to purchase trees to offset the remainder of our website carbon emissions. More to come on that next year.
The great thing about doing all of this work to lower our website carbon footprint, is that it also makes our website kinder to our visitors and helps to improve SEO too. A triple win.
And there you have it!
A brand and website refresh – let’s be honest – can be quite a lot of work. But I’m already seeing returns on my time and money investments – one week after we’ve gone live.
More importantly, I feel proud of our online home. I’m now walking my talk, which means I feel more confident in sharing my passion around how to create websites that are kind to people and the planet.
And, as I enter the new year, I have a clear vision of my ideal clients and the products and services we have created just for them.
Considering a brand and / or website refresh?
Grab a copy of our website creation companion. This guide steps you through everything you need to know about creating a kind and successful brand and website.