Brought in to re-design the websites for Creating Excellence and Inspirational Speakers, we looked at their existing visual branding and quickly realised that the whole visual signposting of the organisation needed a re-think.

So with our six branding hats on (!) we ‘re-thunk’ their identity by tweaking the core over-arching brand (CEx) and introducing the sub-brands (which had no visual independence) underneath the core typeface, but with a subtle graphic tweak by replacing the star with an icon for each product ; and colour associating each division.

We thought this route a good one because by introducing all of the icons as “people” in different poses (relevant to the division) it automatically associated the brand with humans. (CEx is a people focused business) So that it in turn gives a visual association that the brand is all about people (rather than just products), a theme that resonated strongly throughout the organisation’s ethos.

It also allows for flexibilty as new sub-brands  / divisions come online.

So with the branding now working more effectively we began looking at the websites.

CEx it was felt should act as a ‘group’ page signposting off to the sub-brand sites so this structure was kept very simple so that a quick overview of the organisation could be established at the outset.

IS needed a considerable re-think from how someone would look for a speaker - the old site listed the speakers in category but only gave their pictures (you had no idea who you were looking at unless you happened to know every speaker). We changed this so that thumbnails also gave the name and a bit of info. We also introduced a bunch of new ways to find a speaker, a name filter field, tag cloud, fee band and a brand new dynamic category and sub-cat system that only displayed if a speaker existed in that category. There’s also your ROTM search engine in there for multiple-mega-redundancy.

For the speakers we created a page with show and hide DIV’s for profile extra content, that once again only shows if the content exists, from links to extra photos to embedded YouTube video, which all enhance the speakers profile and provide the prospective client with a wealth of information before making a decision to book them or not.

View the websites here :

www.creatingexcellence.co.uk |  www.inspirationalspeakers.co.uk