This is a topic that designers with quite different goals all have to address. Promotion of a product, brand, or service means making use of all the available channels. Large companies obviously take a keen interest in the cross-media presentation of their brand and ensure that all websites, Best online marketing, social media pages, apps, and related products are designed with the same consistent branding. If you run a small business or you’re promoting a new product then you should have the same concerns. But if you are designing a CMS site for an existing product, then you are somewhat limited in how creative you can be, to the extent that if the product already has an associated font then it should be incorporated into the website.
I have faced such issues when branding and promoting a documentary film I am making called From Runes to Ruins. A designer worked on the logo and associated fonts, which were Gotham Book and Gotham Bold. I designed a simple web banner using a relevant font online called Elder Futhark, which is based on an ancient Runic form of writing which is relevant to the film itself. Setting up the social media was easy, it only required some resizing of the images before uploading them. But designing the CMS site posed a greater challenge. I got another designer to work with me on the main site and explained to him the marketing strategy that we would employ and what the website needed to achieve. One of the first problems I faced was that Gotham Book is not a web-ready font so the design had to suffer inconsistency from a branding perspective.
The film has no funding or distribution, so the website is as much for potential buyers and investors as it is a means to build hype among potential viewers. Film being a visual medium, I felt that the principal aspect of the associated website should be visual and for this reason, a basic image slider dominates the landing page. This is placed next to an image link to a trailer hosted on YouTube. The idea is to prevent playback errors on some mobile devices for which embedded YouTube videos don’t always work. Directing people away from the site is also a means to encourage them to engage with the media through the Google+/YouTube (recently) integrated comment system, which I hoped would result in more shares and +1s.
It’s not my intention to retain traffic or to encourage repeat visits, so there is very little content on the website. Visitors will hopefully watch the trailer and perhaps get in touch with me via the contact page for more information. After the film is finished I will add a news feed, updating visitors on the progress the film has made but for now, the only written content is on the synopsis page.
Visually, I felt that a stripped-down, minimalist design would create fewer problems for access via multiple mediums and would create less visual distraction from the subject matter of the documentary itself. Obviously, I couldn’t see a minimalist design with very little text translating into huge volumes of traffic, but the unnecessary text wouldn’t reflect well on the brand and sometimes less is more, for both design and traffic.
Large white spaces on the page may make some designers cringe but I hoped to evoke the atmosphere of an art gallery and reflect some of the artistic intent of the documentary. Having informed the designer of these intentions, we browsed relevant Woo themes to find a close match for a minimalistic design and decided on the Currents theme which is intended for news sites. The superfluous widgets were removed via the dashboard leaving the simple stripped-down design that remains.
SEO gurus will impress upon you the importance of rich text loaded with keywords and that is something I had to sacrifice in order to maintain the sparse and desolate design I wanted. Adding a blog page would create greater opportunities for link baiting and improved SEO but for now, the site serves its promotional purposes without luring traffic by vaguely relevant search terms. I imagine that any designer that favors minimalist, image-heavy layouts has to make a trade-off on SEO by having so little text on their site.
