I love nothing better than seeing businesses transform and this brand identity is just one of the most recent projects I have been working on with Dougie and Paula at Silverscreen Photography and Video.
Dougie and Paula contacted me a few months ago, they had spent the lockdown on courses, refining their already fabulous skills and now had a clear idea what they wanted their rebrand to look like.
Having secured a grant for a website build, now was the time they needed help. They already knew me and have always loved my design and writing skills, they wanted me on board to help them.
The transformation of their website and branding has made my heart sing with delight and I am so grateful they trusted me to guide them through the very messy stage resulting in a beautiful redesign of their old website.
I wanted to share their journey with you to show you how I helped them through their rebrand.
Dougie and Paula knew they had a pretty awful website, it had been created many years ago without much thought to it. Pages and pages had been piled onto the site and it had become messy, difficult to navigate and certainly wasn't inspiring. It had been a case of either ignoring it or shoving a few more things onto it.
Business was busy which was great but with the arrival of the lockdown they jumped at the opportunity to change and started evaluating their entire business. They knew they were attracting the wrong clients, they were feeling frustrated they were not able to be creative, consequently leading to lower prices and functioning on a wedding treadmill.
This is a screenshot of the old website, it wasn't serving them well, extremely outdated, couldn't read the company name, a very old cheap logo and I can't begin to tell you how many drop down pages there were! The footer with so many links was bigger than the website. This definitely had to be redesigned.
The challenge for me was to steer them through their rebrand.
I had to bring clarity, ensure they were talking to their ideal clients, injecting that all important style and raising their game. I knew from their brief exactly what they wanted to achieve and we are almost at the finishing line!
Photographer and videographers websites are a lot of work, there are many elements including galleries, private client galleries, plus the usual webpages to consider, the backend of these styles of websites are massive but for a client viewing it, it must be clear, elegant, easy to navigate and most importantly draw in customers who wish to make a booking.
The first thing I did was eliminate a lot of unnecessary pages, we consolidated multiple pages and lost many more that were never going to be relevant, having the backbones in place we re-tweaked this again and finally had a sound brief for the website designer to start rebuilding their site without losing any of their SEO.
The next step was to work through their galleries of photos. Dougie and Paula had put together a gallery of their images they wished to use for the new website design for me to choose from.
With the new scaled down structure I was then able to select the images for each page, making sure they aligned and the aesthetics worked and flowed, I didn't want any image to stand out and scream out of place.
Each image was carefully chosen to also match up to the subject line, for example weddings, about, aerial photography, etc, but they had to flow.
This was my suggestion for the beginning of their landing page.
We dumped the dated logo and I created a suggestion for them on Canva keeping the hearts in but finally they were persuaded to get rid of them and you can see the final logo on their new website, clean and simple. We also got rid of any watermarks on their images, there were many. I know photographers don't like to leave images raw but realistically they look awful with logos across them on their websites.
As we worked through each page and section, I kept placing images together for the website designer to use in the right context and making sure the design aesthetics flowed well.
As Dougie and Paula not only work on weddings, they also do corporate events, it was important to include this without it looking completely different. I also took out anything garish as the website was redeveloped keeping an eye on the progress. The reds, the unreadability of many pages as the website was being designed, a few examples below. We got rid of the harsh blacks and reds, popular with photographers, and created a softer colour palette
We are not finished yet but I wanted to share this website rebrand journey with you. There will be more changes and I have yet to rewrite and check the copy, plus create some blog posts to gain momentum with their SEO, we also need to change a few more fonts but I hope you like the results so far.
Finally we added in a subscribers link to collect email addresses, this is so important for any business at the moment to build an email list. It is a great way of keeping in touch with future and past clients, showing them your offers or latest work. So many new bookings come from referrals and growing your email list is a great way of staying in front of your ideal clients. Do remember their wedding day isn't the only day they will want captured, there will be other family events.
Credits to Silverscreen for all the images and to Craig Murray for the website building.
If you would love some help with your branding, copywriting, blog posts or just an eye on your business then do get in touch, I have many ways of helping you.