INSPO: TO BRING, OR NOT TO BRING

WHY ZERO IDEAS IS A SILLY IDEA

When businesses bring inspiration to a graphic designer, they set the stage for a creative and productive collaboration that can enhance the quality and output of your final product.

Here are five key reasons to bring inspiration to your next design meeting:

ALIGNMENT WITH BUSINESS GOALS

Bringing inspiration to the table helps ensure that your designer’s work aligns closely with your business’s overall goals. When a designer understands the core objectives, brand values, and target audience, they can create visuals that not only look good but also serve a strategic purpose. This alignment ensures that the design effectively communicates your desired message, supports marketing efforts, and resonates with your intended audience.

Together, we fill in our carefully curated Branding Questionnaire which helps identify these core objectives and values in your business.

EFFICIENT USE OF TIME & RESOURCES

Providing clear inspiration and direction helps streamline our creative process. When designers have a solid foundation to work from, we can spend more time refining ideas and less time guessing what the client wants. This efficiency reduces the likelihood of extensive revisions, saving both time and money. It also ensures that the project stays on track and meets deadlines.

ENHANCED CREATIVITY & INNOVATION

Inspiration can serve as a springboard for creativity. By understanding your brand’s identity, goals, and the industry landscape - designers can push the boundaries of traditional designs and explore innovative concepts. This collaborative inspiration can lead to unique, standout designs that differentiate the brand in a crowded market and place you beyond the trend.

CONSISTENCY IN BRAND IDENTITY

When businesses provide us with inspirational material that reflects their brand’s voice, style, and ethos, it helps ensure that the design work remains consistent with existing branding elements. This consistency is vital for building brand recognition and trust with their audience.

IMPROVED COMMUNICATION

Inspiration fosters better communication between business and designer. When both parties have a clear vision of what they want to achieve, it reduces misunderstandings and misalignments. This open line of communication not only makes the design process smoother but also empowers us as designers to ask the right questions and offer valuable suggestions, ultimately leading to a more successful outcome.

TOP 10 FORMS OF DESIGN INSPIRATION:

• Mood Boards

• Fonts and Text Styles

• Music or Artists

• Photography

• Specific Colours

• Textures or Interiors

• Social Media Profiles

• Mindmaps or Brainstorms

• Shapes

• Other Brands and Businesses

READY TO BRING YOUR INSPO TO A QUALIFIED DESIGNER?

OPTIMISING OUR CLIENTS WITH SEO

HOW WE GET YOU TO APPEAR ORGANICALLY IN YOUR SEARCH ENGINE

At MONOCROW, we use a range of techniques to assist with the discoverability of your brand and insist that we tick all the available boxes organic strategies can tick before moving on to paid rank placement in your search engine.

Organic placement does take time, but whether you pay for Google Ads and Ranking or not, SEO optimisation and strategies are a must for successful launch and discovery foundations for your website.

We created this post to provide some further in-depth information on our techniques that we implement within client builds. Whilst this doesn’t touch on everything, it covers major ground in what is included and at what levels.

WHAT WE CREATE AND DESIGN WITH

Which platform we choose depends on your industry and requirements as a business as we believe some platforms do things better than others. For instance, we lean away from WordPress as it was initially intended as a blog platform similar to the Tumblr days. Whilst it has come a long way, we find it isn’t very user-friendly when clients want to manage their own platforms and make small changes.

For E-commerce related businesses we do prefer to design over on Shopify as they dominate in this space and offer a lot more tools and support in the selling of products and SaaS (Subscription) businesses.

However, our go-to for all service-based, creative or portfolio style business is definitely Squarespace. Studies have shown that businesses are moving towards low or no-code websites for ease of maintenance, lower running costs and successful conversions. We find Squarespace strikes the perfect balance of aesthetic and function.

SEO & SQUARESPACE

We also love it for its in-built functions which begin as the basis for our inclusions and the start of your website’s SEO journey. All sites include:

• Sitemaps - Squarespace sites come with an automatic XML sitemap. Your sitemap usually stays current and includes all URLs and metadata for SEO-friendly indexing.

• SSL Certificates - Squarespace offers free SSL certificates so site visitors have a secure connection for their entire visit. It’s also why your site will start with Https.

• Mobile-friendly - Responsive design. Meaning your content will automatically resize to fit various devices and screen widths which is crucial for Google Search.

• Clean HTML and URLs - HTML markup and URLs are indexed with ease.

• Robots.txt - This file is built for you, but can optionally block web crawlers.

Without explaining crawlers, essentially Google is able to search your website for attributes/words/functions and deem them appropriate for certain search results. Without these in place it can stop you from appearing at all.

ON-PAGE Optimisation - KEYWORDS & MORE

By collating potential consumer data, we’re able to utilise possible answers, content or information that they would be seeking via Google Search. This is known as keywords and on-page optimisation. This ensures organic foot traffic and when done correctly can be all you need to rank depending on your location and industry.

The way we do this successfully is by being aware of how smart search engine’s are becoming. Developments in technology can now decipher when content is considered disingenuous. In other words, it can tell when keywords are used for SEO purposes and when it is used authentically within your information. Google prefers quality content that provides value to the person searching.

• Keyword placement - We place your keyword data within different layers and levels of your site as part of on-page optimisation (titles, tags and metadata to name a few). We also consider accessibility which is becoming increasingly important and includes things like alternative text and specific structure of content. Making sure it is visually coherent, functional and adaptable.

• Internal Linking - is also utilised as a funnel for your website and for Google to assess your credibility as a search solution. The more websites we can have linked to your newest build, the better the result.

• Accessibility - By writing content that addresses searcher intent, we’re able to boost organic reach and put your website in front of more customers. We focus on quality over quantity with page numbers and ensure easy functionality whilst adhering to the aesthetics of your business or brand.

IMAGE QUALITY, load times AND MOBILE layout

SEO can also be influenced by your websites load time. A faster load time will not only keep customers engaged for longer but will see a better search result as Google deems the site more user-friendly. We ensure your images are of the highest quality without budging your load times.

Our favourite feature of our Squarespace sites is the option to design specifically for Desktop and Mobile. It provides two separate layouts to accomodate for phone and computer usage, allowing your site to look 100% on every device. This does mean we create two separate builds of every website we create in order for it to appear perfectly across desktop and mobile.

Google is progressively favouring sites that function well on mobile as it contributes to more than 60% of online traffic.

FURTHER STRATEGIES

Some more advanced and complex options that are dependent on the type of website and subscription are as follows - Highlighted is what we would recommend and what has seen result:

• Schema Markup - Is a type of code that can inform search engines about a page.

• Multilingual Website Tags

• Optimising for Google Voice Searches - Utilising lower page speeds and content that would respond to a voice search with the focus on user-intent.

• Building Custom 404

• Submit your Sitemap to Google - AKA Sign-up for Google Console and Google Analytics.
  This helps verify your website and other profiles such as Google Business.

• From here we would advise professional paid ad assistance.

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