Review: Brand Identity Guru - great concept but lacking best practice
Clearly the chaps at BrandIdentityGuru have a good concept and that's why they ordered up some ReviewMe reviews - therefore this is a sponsored post.
The Review
It's actually refreshing to see a site being promoted that has such an accomplished look and feel; some sites that breeze through ReviewMe look like they fell out of 1999 and missed a few lectures on best practice. However, this was possibly the first site I have visited in a long time (that wasn't Youtube) that made me mute Winamp.The second the page loads a video overlay of a woman plays in the bottom right corner of the website. You don't see this done very often and therein comes it's effectiveness. It's not uncommon for a traditional video testimonial to be played on sites such as these, but to see a video explaining their service without being constrained by the 'Youtube'-esque borders.
The video doesn't play too long but it offers a nice synopsis of what the site is all about - and that's important. After sitting and watching the video (like almost every visitor probably will...) you're almost compelled to toy around with the site and that's a good thing.
What does the site do then?
The site is there to raise awareness of how important branding is to your business. People all too often get caught up in SEO, PPC campaigns and all the other necessities of business promotion but they never stop to think whether their branding is sufficient to create decent market recognition.
There are a few quizzes to take to help assess your current Corporate Internet Branding and whether it needs some work. The tests on offer are:
- The Internet brand strength test
- The branding guri challenge
Both ask some very interesting questions about the feedback you're getting from customers and how prosperous your current branding is. They're more targetted towards medium sized e-business but there's definately some things for the low level entrepreneur to think about too.
Not just consultancy
What's really smart is that BIG don't just offer enlightenment on where your branding is failing; they take things much further than that.
If you're US based they can provide a "free website analysis", covering SEO Content, SEO Architecture, PageRank Evaluation, Backward, Links Evaluation, Competitive Analysis, Key Word Penetration, Content Evaluation, Competing Web Pages and Strategic Linking Structure. Not a bad thing to receive for free if you don't have the knowledge yourself - even if it is just a basic SEO report.
Portfolio
They have quite a portfolio on offer covering a wide range of marketing practices. They've got experience in web design, rebranding, direct mails, printed media, logos, corporate identity and more. But why?
Sales!
Smart. They offer this level of automated consultancy for a reason - to get sales. Something I found comforting initially
was the presence of their address on the homepage - even the lady gave a phone-number in the initial video. So if you like what you see they have sales material front-and-center; you can call them, mail them or email the sales department.
It's a bit like running a web-design blog showcasing your work and offering pointers towards best practice: yet also having a portfolio and rate-card available. It's essentially having a good review next to the "buy now" button - it's good marketing.
Constructive Criticism
I only have one problem with the site and that's when you get a pop-up window. Occasionally information is presented inside a pop-up window (such as when you click on "free website analysis"). These pages are poorly branded and look rather cheap and completely undermine the advice that they provide. I suggest that they provide this information in a pop-up like LightBox but keep it branded. Having a sexy flash-dominated website isn't much good when the pop-ups are completely detracting from this theme. You're offering branding consultancy - you need to be perfect and consistent in doing so. The below screenshot shows what I mean.
The site itself
The web developer in me has to look at the source code of sites like these and... well, it isn't what I would consider best practice. It has frames to do most of the work - which isn't really necessary in this day and age. In addition, using tables for general layout isn't advisable either.
Not accessible nor best practice
Some images don't have alt text or title attributes (seeing as they're using spacer-images: a practice that CSS should have killed) and some spacer images have keyword-specific alt/title tags. One specific spacer has the alt "Professional brand identity services" which isn't strictly true, considering it's a blank image. Their stylesheet has no more than 15 styles in it; mostly to mark-up "A" tags and the basic background colours.
Unfortunately the site is quite relient on specific technologies (namely Flash) and while there is a "Can't see this?" link at the top right of the page, it wasn't the text-only accessible version I was hoping for - but more an explanation of where you can get the plugin from. Turn off Javascript and you get next-to-nothing. It wouldn't have been much effort to include a NOSCRIPT element into the page explaining why you're not seeing anything. The below screenshot shows what you get without Javascript enabled.
I wouldn't use them for web consultancy
For those above reasons. In this day and age you shouldn't be using tables for layout and if you're entirely relient on a specific technology (Javascript for example) then you really need an alternative version to remain accessible (text only is a good idea). It may seem like harsh criticism but if you're offering consultancy then you need to be demonstrating best practice. It'd be like having a really ugly, poorly marked up web-design agency website - to obtain sales you need to have something that someone wants. and that is normally the website you're selling from. While it looks fine it could do with a rebuild to remain true to best practice.
Always remember good accessibility = good SEO
Good accessibility is good Search Engine Optimisation. If the information is easy to access for alternative browsers then search engine spiders will be able to index your content more efficiently and ultimately give you better listings. Shunning accessibility for aesthetics is false economy in the long run.
In conclusion, BrandIdentityGuru have quite a simple mission statement; "Pumping up your brand" and that's what they try to do. Raising awareness of the importance of branding and how well yours is performing is a nice idea. I wish them all the best, if they take heed of my criticism then things should start moving in a very good direction but as things stand I'm not sure I would use them. I'm a web developer by trade and the site just doesn't shout professionalism to me because of how it's been built and the little inconsistencies. I wish them all the best because what they're doing is a very good idea.
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