We developed this logo for The Fixer East Africa, a company whose business it is to make sure your business is going well, whatever it is, from organizing your photo or film shoot to your corporate events.
The American Scrubs Company said they wanted a new logo, so we thought we would give the competition a try – it is good to keep build the always needed logo development skills sharp.
Their brief stated clearly that they wished not to have the Red, White and Blue very obvious, we were okay with that, and tried a couple of options.
We were asked to design this logo for a small tech firm in Nairobi Kenya, who had developed an innovative way to help give Kenyans websites. We were asked to keep the logo simple dynamic and orange
We developed a website for safaris and holidays Kenya, a Nairobi based tours and travel company.
We built a website for KWT, a small, experienced, and dynamic group of people working together through the safari industry to create, facilitate, and implement projects that will achieve long-term impacts with measurable outcomes for conservation in Kenya.
We developed a fully dynamic for Delta Partnership, a solution-focused organisation that does not rely on pre-conceived ideas, but rather seeks to work through the most practical options, using best practice concepts that fit the local situation.
Ricochet Research approached AKSENT Ltd about a dynamic website that would also allow for the use of a blog.
In a world where you can get free templates and your Macintosh can create killer brochures in no time flat, where are businesses like ours going? I have given this much thought over the past few months and these are my thoughts:
1. everyone has become a designer
Many of my clients are now coming to me with layouts they mocked up on their macs and telling me this is what i want, don’t change anything, just make it seo safe and add a cms.
This is not bad because [for now] cms integration is still quite a technical field and optimization and seo really need someone that knows what they are doing. So on this i am not so negative, it is also a plus when your client doesn’t waste your time butchering your beautiful template.
2. Free templates and logos
Many sites are now offering free templates that just bolt on to various cms’, no technical expertise required…
On this i am not so negative because this type of client is the type that takes most of your time and pays you least, i consider this a loss of margarine, it wasn’t the source of your main income anyway (bread and butter).
So I am wondering where we are going, we have ten times as many folks saying they are designers, half as many real customers and half as many again who really are looking for quality designers…
We are going to a time where, to be honest, design is going to get really good – a lot of competition leads to high quality and niche and such – then it will get really bad – anyone with enough time to be innovative will soon decide they can make better money on other things…
anyway, these are just ramblings… design is forever where quality matters, i worry because quality is mattering less where clients are paying and even then they are paying less… i’ll stop here and think about my current project instead 🙂
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is serious business, it makes the difference between your website design being seen by folks or not being seen by folks. I hear you say “but they will get the website i have had designed from my name or my business card!” There is a great deal of truth to that, but what if they forgot you? What if they have never heard of you? And somehow they have this massive job and are looking for you or even someone like you on a website like google but don’t know how to find you?
In this article i will help you with the basics of SEO for your website design, the details leave to to your website designers and developers. In fact, let me just list out a number of things you should make sure your developers do: 1. ensure you have a good title tag; 2. ensure you have a good description tag; 3. ensure there are no tables in your design; 4. ensure there is minimal use of flash on your website; and 5. ensure all images have an alt description tag filled. AND ENSURE THIS IS DONE FOR EVERY PAGE.
Those are technical things and those generally you just need to make sure your website designer has done. Now to the things you can do to really make the process of website design worthwhile, I would break them down into three things, 1. keep the website fresh; 2. make sure there is enough content volume on the website to justify a high rank position; and 3. make sure the content is themed throughout your website design. What does this mean and how it is done?
1. Keeping the website design fresh
To do this frankly all you need to do is put new content regularly on your website. When i say regularly i say at best every day or so and at worst every two weeks. How is this done, if you have website designed by aksent, you will have a php news module on your website.
The aksent php news module allows you as a website owner to regularly update your website design without much technical knowledge, we create a system through which you update you news on your website design your self.
2. Website content volume justifies position
Website content volume is essentially judged by the length of time you can spend talking about a given subject, the more specific a subject the better your rankings will be. The idea is this: if your information is original, accurate and good you will naturally or organically end up with people linking to your page, in other words quoting you. The more people quote your website design the better respected your website gets. So, keep adding good volumes of content to your website, we would say you try for about 500 words per entry.
3. Make sure the content is themed throughout your website design
Themed content is pretty straight forward, keep your website about one topic – this means that if your website is new and it is about hardware in kenya, don’t talk about your safari last week, that ruins the theming on your website. If the website is small especially – less than 200 pages, this truly negatively affects your search rankings, so stick to your topic, if you want to bring up your safari, you better mention the hardware used in the buildings and safari vehicles you show photos of, and you can then stick the occasional lion in there.
Kiligolf came to us with this brilliant website design and asked us to chop it up to CSS/XHTML and attach a CMS. Compare the image with the result.
We did this job with minimum supervision only checking back a couple of times with the designer regarding minor details that were not immediately clear.
This is an example that shows AKSENT is willing to work with your designers to bring your website into reality, even if we did not design it.
