Case Study – Branding & Web Design for DeLozier Strategy & Execution

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Written By: Michaela

My client…

Dane DeLozier came to me to have an online presence created for his growing consulting business. He had been growing his business by word of mouth referrals only but felt it was time to have an online presence for people who didn’t personally know him get to know him and his business. He wanted a place to send people and start to have a solid online face to his growing consulting practice.

During the process, I started working with Emily, an employee of the practice to finalize the design details and bring everything to life.

Why he reached out…

Before reaching out to me Dane had been operating strictly offline with people that he knew or people who were one person removed from him. However, over the last several months of growth, he was extending beyond those circles and starting to get clients who he didn’t have a personal connection to.

This is when he decided he needed an online presence as an informational hub for people to get to know his business and for him to start building brand recognition.

Dane reached out to me to help him strategically take his ideas about his brand and create a cohesive visual identity that we could translate to his online presence.

How I helped…

We started out talking about the goals for the business’ visual identity, both short-term goals and the ultimate long-term direction the business would take so that we could take into account how the brand needed to grow rather than constantly being adjusted and changed.

He had lots of great ideas and connections he wanted to bring in and explore during the process. One of the fun ideas we got to explore was the connection nature has to business growth.

The process…

You took my ideas into careful consideration, you were patient with my hand-drawn design renderings, and you responded quickly and accurately to all of our edits and suggestions. You also gave excellent advice on matters pertaining to website functionality, which we needed. – Emily, DeLozier Strategy & Execution

We worked together over the course of the project to explore how the goals for the project could be designed in such a way that to connect what DeLozier Strategy & Execution does for their clients.

We started with the branding because without that we wouldn’t have a solid look and feel direction for the website and our biggest concern was making everything fit and be cohesive.

Once we had a visual brand direction through the use of a mood board I was able to start drafting up different logo design ideas using the mood board as my starting guide.

Once the logo, vision, mission and color palette was nailed down it was time to tackle the website.

We sat down for our strategy session and hashed out all the different ideas we wished for the website and then prioritized the list based on what we felt like we could accomplish during the initial launch of the project.

I’ve found that while it would be great to have 100% of the content ready to go sometimes there are ideas that are just too big to wait on and when I know the direction the website is going to go I can plan for its growth. This way any additional features feel like an extension rather than a lean-to added on later.

Results…

Michaela is skilled at taking what you have in your head and making it come alive via branded design. We were clear on our own mission, but we didn’t know how to communicate it effectively, incorporating all of the visual elements that have become the norm for today’s communication. We had the words, but we didn’t have the design. That’s where Michaela was the perfect fit for us! Her thoughtful incorporation of our content (and attempts at design layout) with her vision for how to best represent our consulting services yielded a website and other marketing collateral that not only say what we need them to say, but reflects who we are. – Emily, DeLozier Strategy & Execution

Dane is ready to start using his website as the foundation for his online presence. With a few blog posts ready to publish as soon as we launched he is already building a strong SEO base for driving traffic his way.