Branding & Identity

Your brand identity needs to represent your business core values unequivocally, through a clear and cohesive message that truly differentiates you from your competition. For your brand to “stick,” this message has to reflect more than your products or services attributes, it needs to become a vehicle to express your organization’s culture and values as well.

If you already have a brand strategy in place, minimal design can help you bring its online iteration to life. And if you do not have a brand identity fully developed yet, minimal design will create a complete online strategy for you.

Online Strategy Development

A website should be more than the sum of its parts. It needs to be the realization of a complete online strategy. How you get visitors to your website and how you keep them coming back is the bottom line. But how you connect to your audience, and how your users relate to your brand on an emotional level is the key.

Without the awareness of these principles and a clearly structured plan of action, your site might still be a success, but why take the chance?

minimal design will guide you throughout the development process and help you keep in mind the big picture, so that the end product is not only a website that works for you, but also a complete, coherent, and unique online experience for your audience.

Information Architecture

Clean code and beautiful design are important aspects of a website. But providing a flawless user experience while fulfilling your organization’s strategic goals is what makes the difference.

minimal design makes websites that don’t need a “skip intro” button, websites that are easy to understand and simple to use, websites where every interface element has a purpose, and every design decision has a meaning, websites that just work. For you, and your users.

Interface Design

Even when you have a strong brand, a crystal clear message, a great product or service, and a well structured websites, you still need to make sure your users can find the “buy” button where they expect it to be, and that this button begs to be clicked on.

minimal design makes websites that are visually stunning, but also functional. Your users will enjoy both looking at your website and using it. They will stay longer and come back more often.

Usability & Accessibility

Usability

As Steve Krug’s wife puts it so eloquently: “If something is hard to use, I just don’t use it as much.” This summarizes quite well the idea behind usability: every design element should take user interaction into consideration in order to find seamless solutions to any potential problems that could create user’s confusion or frustration, before they arise.

In short, that means minimal design does the thinking when designing your site so that your users don’t have to while using it.

Accessibility

Allowing access to the content of your website to people with disabilities is a no-brainer… right? Yet many websites do not comply with the W3 Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and/or the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines.

minimal design builds every websites with accessibility in mind, complying with as many accessibility guidelines as each project allows.

CMS Implementation

A CMS (Content Management System) facilitates the organization, control, and publication of content on your website through a simple web based interface. It empowers you with the ability to update your own website’s content without requiring any technical knowledge.

minimal design offers different turnkey solutions, depending on requirements and budget:

Name Registration & Hosting

I you’d rather not worry about any of the technical details, minimal design can manage all aspects of running your website, including name registration and hosting, so all you have to do is sit back and relax while your site goes live.

Of course, if you are technically savvy and would rather take care of it yourself, that’s no problem. However, please consult minimal design before selecting your hosting company to assure their offering meets the minimum requirements necessary to run your website.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is comprised of two symbiotic components:

  • A “Search Engine Friendly” website
  • A complete SEO marketing strategy

Many companies provide stand-alone SEO marketing services which can be very effective but costly. Regardless of wether or not you decide to hire their services, you will need a “Search Engine Friendly” website. This aspect of SEO relies more on technology than marketing technics and requires specific implementation within your website source code as well as its overall structure. This is why SEO needs to be incorporated into the initial development phase of your website.

minimal design understands how critical search engine results can be for the success of your project and will integrate Search Engine Optimization technics at the core of your website.

Maintenance & Monitoring

When you buy your hosting plan through minimal design, you get a free basic maintenance package with it that includes 24/7 monitoring for downtime and overall server performance, a complete monthly website backup (separate from the hosting company’s own backup system), and a daily backup of any database used to power your site.

If your website ever goes down, minimal design will contact the hosting company and resolves the issue directly with them. It keeps your website downtime to a minimum and saves you the headache of having to deal with IT problems you don’t necessarily understand in the first place.

In most cases, if you’re planning to update your website’s content frequently, minimal design will recommend implementing a database driven CMS that allows you to perform content updates yourself easily through a web based interface. If you would rather have it done by minimal design, a monthly maintenance plan can be customized to your needs.

Detailed site statistics are also available upon request.

PSD to HTML Conversion

minimal design provides quick turnaround Photoshop (PSD) file conversion to pixel perfect, semantically meaningful, Standards compliant XHTML/CSS (XHTML 1.0 strict or transitional) for back-end developpers and designers.

The turnaround and price may vary depending on the complexity of the design and the project requirements. Feel free to ask for a free quote.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a cheap, easy, flexible, and powerful way to enhance your marketing strategy:

  • You can be proactive about strengthening your relationship with your customers
  • You can provide real value by personalizing emails to your customers’ needs and interests
  • You only pay for the people you’re sending emails to
  • Highest ROI among other direct marketing channels

An Email marketing account with minimal design gets you access to detailed online reports: who opened, who bounced, who unsubscribed, who clicked on what, and much more… This wealth of information allows you to react instantly and fine tune your marketing strategy effortlessly.

View Sample Report Screenshots

Mailing list management is automatic: user subscribing, unsubscribing, bounces, etc… everything is handled by the system.

The service is tailored to your needs: you can let minimal design handle everything, or you can create your own emails from your online account and send them out yourself. It’s up to you.

All emails and templates are hand coded and optimized to get through firewalls, overzealous spam filters, image filtering, and the poor HTML support of most email clients. So your emails actually get delivered to your customers looking the way you intended.

Don’t hesitate to ask for more information and pricing.