Brand vs Logo

Posted on February 28, 2019January 6, 2023 by Allison Robinson

Have you ever wondered what the difference between Brand vs Logo? A lot of times, the two terms are used interchangeably. But brand and logo aren’t the same thing, and just because you have a logo doesn’t mean your brand is all good.

Aren’t brand and logo the same thing?

All squares are rectangles. But not all rectangles are squares. And there you go! The same thing applies to brand vs logo. Your logo is a part of your brand, but your brand includes much more than simply the logo.

So then what’s a brand?

A brand is the set of core values and beliefs of your business and what you represent. It’s not only your products and services, but how you treat customers and even employees. So if people walk inside and instead of “Hello”, you say “Welcome to Pizza Pete’s, the Petest Pizza south of Santa’s House”, then your weird greeting is part of your brand.

All brands have beliefs and values, whether they’re written down or not

It might seem silly to write down what you believe as a business, but customers are going to make the judgment for themselves anyway, so why not give them a push in the right direction? You certainly don’t want to be known as “The one that cheats people” because someone spread bad information and you have nothing to counter it!

But beyond that, customers want to know that they’re in good hands. They want to know why you went into businesses. “I saw a discrepancy I could take advantage of to make a lot of money.” Sure, maybe that’s true. But if you were successful, there was still a need that you fulfilled. And you probably learned a lot along the way too. Talk about that!

The logo doesn’t matter then?

No no, that’s not true at all! Just because your brand is more than your logo doesn’t mean the logo doesn’t matter. Your logo is the visual representation of your brand. It’s what people associate with your product or service. If you have a logo that you’re attached to and people can recognise, then great! Avoid major changes with it or you risk having to regain some of your audience.

But what if you’re a new business or your logo is Meh at best? Professional designers put in a lot of hours into designing a logo – from type to colour theory – because of how important it is. Sometimes, a painful amount of hours for something so small. But they look at sizing, colour schemes, symbolism, mood, and a whole lot more. People see it and think of your business, so it’s crucial that it gives off the right impression!

Need help with your logo or brand?

If all of this brand and logo stuff seems a little too much and you’d rather focus on just doing high quality work, we can help. Our dedicated team has specialists for everything from graphic design to writing these blogs, and everyone does what they’re good at! We can help manage your brand and create a new logo that you’ll be sure to love–after all, you have the final say! Get in touch with us today to get started.

What is the buyer’s journey?

Posted on February 26, 2019January 5, 2023 by Allison Robinson

As a buyer, do you want to be prospected, or demo’d, or closed? The answer is almost always no. This is because it depends on which stage of the journey you’re in. The buyer’s journey is the series of steps a buyer makes before making a purchase. It is a crucial part of understanding your ideal customer and your inbound strategy. There are 3 stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.

For awareness, these steps add zero value to a buyer. Buyers are looking for additional information about your product that can’t be found online.

As a business owner or a salesperson, you can personalise your sales process to the buyer’s context by understanding the buyer’s journey. Whether you’re selling directly to customers or you’re b2b, in this blog post, we’ll define the buyer’s journey, and show you how to think through it when attracting new prospects – from leads to customers and to being delighted.

Why does the buyer’s journey matter?

The buyer’s journey is the process buyers go through to become aware of, consider and evaluate, and decide to purchase a new product or service.

The journey consists of a three-step process:

Awareness Stage: The buyer realises they have a problem.
Consideration Stage: The buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it.
Decision Stage: The buyer chooses a solution.

The graphic below illustrates a sample buyer’s journey for the simple purchasing decision of a doctor visit during an illness.

How to Define Your Company’s Buyer’s Journey

If you don’t have an intimate understanding of your buyers, conduct a few interviews with customers, prospects, and colleagues to get a sense of the buying journey. Here are some questions you should ask to put together the buyer’s journey for your business.

Awareness Stage

During the Awareness stage, buyers identify their challenge or an opportunity they want to pursue. They also decide whether or not the goal or challenge should be a priority. In order to fully understand the Awareness stage for your buyer, ask yourself:

How do buyers describe their goals or challenges?
How do buyers educate themselves on these goals or challenges?
What are the consequences of inaction by the buyer?
Are there common misconceptions buyers have about addressing the goal or challenge?
How do buyers decide whether the goal or challenge should be prioritized?

Consideration Stage

During the Consideration stage, buyers have clearly defined the goal or challenge and have committed to addressing it. They evaluate the different approaches or methods available to pursue the goal or solve their challenge. Ask yourself:

How do buyers educate themselves on the various categories?
What categories of solutions do buyers investigate?
How do buyers perceive the pros and cons of each category?
How do buyers decide which category is right for them?

Decision Stage

In the Decision stage, buyers have already decided on a solution category. For example, they could write a pro/con list of specific offerings and then decide on the one that best meets their needs. Questions you should ask yourself to define the Decision stage are:

What criteria do buyers use to evaluate the available offerings?
When buyers investigate your company’s offering, what do they like about it compared to alternatives? What concerns do they have with your offering?
Who needs to be involved in the decision? For each person involved, how does their perspective on the decision differ?
Do buyers have expectations around trying the offering before they purchase it?
Outside of purchasing, do buyers need to make additional preparations, such as implementation plans or training strategies?

The answers to these questions will provide a robust foundation for your buyer’s journey. Once you know these answers, you can tailor your content and website to meet your users’ needs. The next step is to create content like blog articles, videos, and images.

5 Ways to Help Reduce Your Website’s Page Loading Speed

Posted on July 16, 2018December 8, 2025 by Allison Robinson

The old adage “patience is a virtue” doesn’t really apply online.

When it comes to website loading speed, even a one-second delay can dramatically reduce pageviews, customer satisfaction, and drop conversions.

The speed of your website even affects your website’s performance and subsequently your organic search rankings for SEO. Since 2010, Google has been accounting for a site speed in its algorithm.

So what’s the biggest factor contributing to your page speed?

Size does matter.

It takes browsers time to download the code that makes up your page. It has to download your HTML, your stylesheets, your scripts and your images. All this means it can take a while to download all that data.

As web users expect more engaging website, or UX UI design, the size of a site’s resource files will continue to grow. Each new feature requires a new script or stylesheet that weighs down your site just a little more.

How do you make sure your site is up to speed?

There are some great resources for analysing your site’s speed. Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and GTMetrix are the most popular. Both services will analyse your site and tell you where you’re falling behind.

A little warning: the results can be a bit daunting sometimes, but most fixes are relatively quick and easy. You might not fix everything the speed service recommends, but you should fix enough to make the site experience better for your visitors.

Let’s learn how to speed things up!

Out-of-the-box template solutions like WordPress and Joomla for example are great but do require the know how a little manual labour to get up to speed – It can all be quite daunting, so we are here to help – Obviously expert help comes at a price, but sometimes an investment in the right help can save you time and money in the long run…

Read about the benefits of a custom designed website here…

Now let’s look at some essential speed solutions that every webmaster should consider.

1. Optimize Images

Images are one of the most common bandwidth hogs on the web.

The first way to optimize your images is to scale them appropriately.

Many webmasters use huge images and then scale them down with CSS. What they don’t realize is that your browser still loads them at the full image size.

For example, if you have an image that is 1000 x 1000 pixels, but you have scaled it down to 100 x 100 pixels, your browser must load ten times more than necessary.

Scale your images before you upload them to your site, so you don’t ask for more from your visitors than you should.

Take a look at the size difference when we scaled down one of our images:

The second way to optimize your images is to compress them.

There are several free online tools for image compression, such astinypng.com, that can reduce your image sizes dramatically without losing quality. You can see size reductions anywhere from 25% to 80%!

2. Browser Caching

Why make visitors download the same things every time they load a page?

Enabling browser caching lets you temporarily store some data on a visitors’ computer, so they don’t have to wait for it to load every time they visit your page.

How long you store the data depends on their browser configuration and your server-side cache settings.

To set up browser caching on your server, check out the resources below or contact your hosting company:

3. Compression

Enabling compression is like putting your website into a zip file.

Compression can dramatically reduce your page’s size and thereby increase its speed. According to Digital.gov, The smaller the better, when it comes to page resources.

Compression can knock off 50 – 70% from your HTML and CSS files! That’s a ton of data your visitor won’t have to download.

Compression is a server setting, so how you implement it will depend on your webserver and its settings. Below are some resources for the most common webservers. If you don’t see yours, contact your hosting company to see what they can do.

4. Optimize Your CSS

Your CSS loads before people see your site. The longer it takes for them to download your CSS, the longer they wait. And the slower your website loading speed.

Optimized CSS means your files will download faster, giving your visitors quicker access to your pages.

Start by asking yourself, “do I use all of my CSS?” If not, get rid of the superfluous code in your files. Every little bit of wasted data can add up until your website’s snail-pace speed scares away your visitors.

Next, you should minimize your CSS files. Extra spaces in your stylesheets increase file size. CSS minimization removes those extra spaces from your code to ensure your file is at its smallest size.

So how do you minimize your CSS files?

First, see if your CMS already minimizes your CSS or if there’s an option for it. HubSpot, for example, already minimizes your CSS by default whereas WordPress or Joomla do not.

If your CMS does not have a minimize CSS option, you can use a free online service like CSS Minifier to minimize your files. Simply paste in your CSS and hit “Compress” to see your newly minimized stylesheet.

Minimizing your resource files is a great way to knock some size off your files. Trust me—those little spaces add up quickly.

5. Keep Your Scripts Below the Fold to improve website loading speed

Javascript files can load after the rest of your page, but if you put them all before your content—as many sites do—they will load before your content does.

This affects your website loading speed and means your visitors must wait until your Javascript files load before they see your page, and we know how much they like waiting.

The simplest solution is to place your external Javascript files at the bottom of your page, just before the close of your body tag. Now more of your site can load before your scripts.

Another method that allows even more control is to use the defer or async attributes when placing external .js files on your site.

Both defer and async are very useful, but make sure you understand the difference before you use them:

Async tags load the scripts while the rest of the page loads, but this means scripts can be loaded out of order. Basically, lighter files load first. This might be fine for some scripts, but can be disastrous for others.
The defer attribute loads your scripts after your content has finished loading. It also runs the scripts in order. Just make sure your scripts run so late without breaking your site.

All you need to do is add a simple word in your <script> tags.

For example, you can take your original script

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/path/filename.js”></script>

And add the little code to ensure it loads when you want it.

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/path/filename.js” defer></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/path/filename.js” async></script>

The importance of your scripts will determine if they get an attribute and which attribute you tack on. More essential scripts should probably have the async attribute so they can load ASAP without holding up the rest of your content. The nonessential ones, however, should wait until the end to ensure visitors see your page faster.

But for the best website loading speed, always make sure you test each script to ensure the attribute doesn’t break your site!

Conclusion

As online users demand a richer online experience, the size of our pages will continue to grow. There will be flashier Javascript, more CSS tricks and more third-party analytics to weigh down our sites, but we can’t let this bog us down.

A little attention will go a long way—remember, just a one-second delay is all it takes to lose a lead, so you need to also think about what those lost leads may cost and whether you are using an out-of-the-box template or a custom design.

3 reasons you need to invest in a custom website

Posted on May 30, 2018September 11, 2025 by Allison Robinson

A Custom Website Design is made to fit your needs!

Websites are a lot like shoes – there’s a lot of options out there... And like shoes, one Size and Style does not fit everyone.

Most people with a little bit of tech nous these days can figure out or teach themselves how to create a free (or cheap) templated website – well I use the term create loosely and sure, some template sites may have some variation in style, but essentially they’re a one-size fits all solution.

We simply don’t believe in trying to shoehorn anyone into a solution that doesn’t fit their long-term strategic marketing goals.

Whilst you could ask the question “Have Wix, Squarespace and Shopify killed Custom Web Development?”. We believe the answer is clear. Cheap – or free – ‘will do for now’ solutions ultimately won’t last and could cost you a lot more in the long run.

Continue reading “3 reasons you need to invest in a custom website”

Author: Allison Robinson