Blog: Recent posts

We're still interviewing candidates for the position of Designer, so if you're supremely creative with logo design, brand design, graphic design or web design, please get in touch.

Whether you've recently graduated or have industry experience doesn't matter - it's your ideas, creativity and passion that's important to us and our clients.

Drop us a line with some examples of your work to hello@thecreativebranch.com. 

Intimate knowledge of Creative Suite is essential. As a very desirable bonus you would be a talented Front End Web Designer/Developer, crafting your own designs from visual to code - just as happy designing in TextMate or the like as Photoshop.

We've also got room for another Software Developer at our new studio in Staveley Mill Yard. Take a look at the full description for that .NET Software Developer job vacancy here.

We've just put another website live. A type of website development that's a bit of a departure for us, and I think I'd be right in saying that it's been a steep learning curve for all involved.

Essentially it's a website designed to sell one product, an e-book written by Kendal businessman Tim Marston. The book distills his 10 years of Wikipedic knowledge of gig booking, inbound marketing and search engine optimisation.

A lot of websites of this nature would be deployed with a relatively plain website design to sell an e-book or similar, the idea being the site can quickly 'pivot' to accommodate another product if the market demands it. But not Tim, or us for that matter. Why?

Brand Design

Tim recognises the value of a strong brand identity from his experience with fire performers Juggling Inferno, so the How to Sell Your Act brand was designed from the start to be adaptable for further products. How to Sell Your Business, How to Sell Your Desert Island, and so on and so forth, because we're sure he's got more than one book in him!

Content Managed Website

The website is built on our in-house content management system, and uses these modules: 

• a fully integrated blog, allowing Tim to post blog entries containing 'teaser' excerpts from the book and encourage purchase
• a testimonials module allowing customer feedback to be included throughout the site to build confidence in site visitors 
• a case studies module where Tim can share his customer's successes with visitors and potential customers

Apart from a few other very useful behind the scenes modules used for page management, search engine optimisation and social media integration, the site is actually pretty light on functionality itself, integrating as it does with some well established web apps to supply the other services. 

Email Marketing Integration

AWeber was chosen for email marketing over our usual fave system Campaign Monitor on this occasion as it plays very nicely indeed with Click Bank - among other e-commerce systems - performing clever tricks such as: 

• automatically moving email subscribers between lists, based on an e-commerce transaction on the Click Bank site - from prospects to customers, for example
• automatically sending periodic follow up emails based on an action, such as joining a list
• adding email subscribers to different lists such as affiliates, prospects and customers from the How to Sell Your Act website using the AWeber API

E-commerce Integration

Click Bank was the preferred e-commerce provider this time over our in-house e-commerce website solution as it: 

• has a global community of affiliate sellers in place that will sell a product on a vendors behalf, the vendor receiving a commission from each sale
• takes care of the credit card/payment authorisation process on a vendors behalf

Brand, Website and Print Design

We've tried to strike a balance between the hard sell that this type of site demands and also ensuring that the site reflects the time, effort and experience that Tim has put into writing his e-book, which The Creative Branch designed too. Follow this link if you'd like the chance to read the book. But it'll cost you! 

When we heard that Apple had announced that the latest version of their operating system 10.7 Lion would be released in July at the cheap as chips price of $29, the studio was filled with unmanly squeals of excitement rather than the roars of mighty Lions. July?! How much?! Exactly.

Their last version, Snow Leopard was the same price, however that was more of an optimised spit and polish of 10.5 rather than a brand new release, so the price was no surprise.

This time around though, the price does come as a bit of a surprise. especially when you take a look at all the new features. But should it be a surprise?

By lowering the price so much for an OS - and using electronic distribution - Apple has drastically lowered the bar regards upgrading to their latest OS. Upgrading to an OS that has (ironically) learnt it's lessons from its much younger sibling, iOS. Upgrading to an OS that is slowly being aligned to that running on the iPhone and iPad, the undisputed kings of locked-in-content consumption.

Upgrading to that new OS - for a Mac owner at least - is now just as trivial as downloading Doctor Zhivago on iTunes. Plus pay for one copy for all your Macs. It's no longer all about the OS or the hardware for Apple. It's all about the content. They take 30% commission for every app sale in the App Store, a situation that the successful developers at least seem to be more than happy with. They take a similar commission for sales in iTunes.

An OS purchase is no longer that 3 yearly mega-event. Apple have introduced a disruption into the market that must secretly give it's competitors the fear. Especially since Windows has nothing like the embedded revenue stream of the App Store and iTunes. 

Of course the real question on everybody's lips is... now they're they've reached Lion, what are they going to call 10.8?

7lb 8oz Sadie Rumney V3.0 was deployed on Sunday the 17th April at 1.08pm in Lancaster, around one week ahead of schedule.

Mother and daughter are both doing great. Congratulations to the Rumneys from everyone at The Creative Branch!

The brief from Sean the MD at Atlantis Kitchens in Kendal, Cumbria was to convey the care, craftsmanship and thought the team at Atlantis put into every one of their kitchen or bedroom design and installation projects.

Although the site is built on our standard Core content management system, as with Atlantis's kitchen creations, the design is anything but standard! 

Sue used an oversized accordion on the home page to quickly get across the key messages. Using this wide format also allows the kitchen shots to shout WOW as loudly as they deserve to. 

Inside, the mix of stylish case studies, glowing customer testimonials and reassuring information about the Atlantis ethos should be enough to tempt those hungry for a new kitchen to fill out the enquiry form or pick up the phone and book a free home design visit. 

Yum. Atlantis love kitchen design, we love web design!