kc web design – new website, updated brand

Looking after your own website and brand is sometimes very hard. When client website design work comes first it can be tricky to find the time to redesign and rebrand you’re own company, especially when you’re a small web design agency like we are. About 18 months ago I had the time to look at our existing website design and branding and have a think about where we wanted to take it next. The original website and brand was coming up to being nearly 8 years old and so it was clearly due for a bit of TLC. I worked on the design for the new website over 12 months ago and the brand has gone through many iterations over the past 18 months – some of them completely different to what you see now. Its been a long drawn out process due to client projects taking priority but I think that has helped the design evolve and the brand come back to a simple update rather than a complete overhaul.

The new website design

We decided to change the website for a simple reason – every web design agency website had started to look the same. Searching on Google produced a list of web design agencies who’s sites had become very similar in look and feel. We wanted the kc web design site to be a little different, to be memorable, to be designed and not look like a ready made WordPress theme. The new design has been created to focus more on showcasing what we do. The project pages have been completely changed so that they showcase more of our designs. The overall feel of the site has been simplified yet designed to create a full experience that showcases the type of work we can produce and that doesn’t look like other websites in our industry. Considerable time has also been spent on cleaning up many many years of articles, categories and tags that have gotten in a bit of a mess over time. SEO was also a bit consideration so we’ve tested,  cleaned up and adapted almost all of the template code and content to create a much simpler, cleaner and more optimised site for Google.

The new brand

When looking at the brand and how we wanted to bring it up-to-date we went through so many options the essence of the logo got lost. Luckily, with the client project work we had on it meant we needed to leave big gaps between work on the new brand and so coming back to things meant we could look at the design with fresh eyes. And those fresh eyes never really liked where the brand had gone. It had become over designed, complicated and it was trying too hard to be something new and different. So we went back to basics and took the essence of the original design and simply gave it a more modern and classic feel.