(Q&A) Where to Start: Branding and Web Design with Paulownia Design Studio
For 2023 my monthly photo chats email has been taken over by the ‘Where to start’ series, a monthly Q&A with different creative professionals across Aotearoa. In this series we chat with copywriters, videographers, web developers, designers, and more about what you need to know before bringing them onboard in your business.
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Getting to know Jamie from Paulownia:
Jamie lives and works in Waihi Beach and loves the delightfully simple things in life like beach days, bush walks and campfires. She also loves to keep the branding and web design process simple and delightful for her clients. After working in agency and in-house teams for a decade, Jamie left the corporate hustle to start her own studio 6 years ago.
In a nutshell what do your services help businesses achieve?
We deliver branding and web design services with a good dose of marketing strategy. Essentially if you're wanting a logo or rebrand and new website we are your peeps. Our approach aims to transcend trends and deliver a down to earth, credible service and best bang for buck strategies for small business. We are also big on helping small business choose sustainable, future-focused options so we can all help save the planet. My Partner Dale is a Product designer/mech engineer so we pull him in when a client is after packaging and product design too.
Brand strategy, what is it and how is it applied in the day-to-day?
The essence of brand strategy is simply knowing who your business is and what makes it undeniable to your audience and having that intent/awareness with everything the business does and touches. In that respect it kinda becomes the bloodstream of your business and is applied to all areas and touch points. Tangibly, good brand strategy defines and gives intent around a business's looks, personality and behaviour.
In regards to website builds, when would it make sense to bring on a web designer/builder over building a website themselves with a drag & drop builder?
Such a juicy question! Let's be honest, drag and drop builders are pretty flipping great! Big benefits a good web designer can offer are:
Designing for search engine optimisation (i.e helping improve where your website ranks in Google Search)
Conversion funnel consideration i.e. designing the site to lead potential buyers on a journey to purchase / call you or download a resource to sign up to your newsletter (whatever your purpose is)
Obvs a site designed by a good designer is going to look super duper banging! Hopefully they can give you a spot of training too so you can make updates to the site yourself going forward to save on costs.
Enlighten us about carbon neutral website hosting for a quick sec.
OO so glad you asked about this!! So the internet's carbon footprint is gnarly. All the servers (e.g the thingies where your website data is stored - like a massive USB drive) that run on fossil fuels, not to mention all the server hardware etc have a massive environmental impact. I read somewhere last week that if the internet was a country it would be the fourth biggest greenhouse gas polluter! This kinda makes us cringe so we are on a mission to do something about it. We now offer carbon neutral website hosting to help reduce the environmental impact of our sites. This means the servers that run our website match 100% of the energy consumed by their operations with renewable energy and maintain a commitment to carbon neutrality. We've got a cool little accreditation badge that goes at the bottom of our sites to show our clients have chosen to help make a difference.
Let’s chat $$$, don’t be surprised to see X service costing anywhere between . . .
We have a new "ready to roll" website design service where as an intro offer we deliver a professionally designed 4 page site from $1250+gst in 7 days. You choose the style from our gallery and once you supply content and branding, we'll launch a real life website for you in 7 days. You can also opt for our carbon neutral website hosting package of $399+gst / year. If you're after a full custom 4 page website that starts around the $3000 mark.
A golden nugget of graphic/web designer wisdom:
Don't launch a site and then leave it to grow cobwebs. Updating your website regularly contributes to your ranking in Google search. I think that's an important point for designing and launching a website: You don't have to have EVERYTHING sorted to launch your site, start small and let it grow as you do. Google will love you for it.
Big thanks to Jamie for giving us all some general awareness around what the heck carbon neutral website hosting is (and it's importance!) along with sharing some additional deets on branding and websites for your business.
To see more of Paulownia's work, have a stalk through their insta and website.
In next month’s Q&A we’ll be hearing from copywriter, Meg Raynor, on how to know if you’ve picked a good copywriter, what it’s like to work with one, and money chats - what you can expect to pay. Join the newsletter get notified when the next chat drops.