Since 1999 we’ve done a lot of web development and online marketing work for a lot of different clients, and we’ve become more experienced in certain industries than others, namely; self storage, venture capital, and law firms. While we can certainly design a great site or provide SEO for any type of company (although there are some types of companies we won’t do work for…), we have some special expertise when it comes to these three industries. We just launched a website for Price Self Storage in San Diego which is a good example. There’s not much we haven’t done for this company. We reworked their brand just slightly, designed a new website, built a content management system, integrated the site with Centershift’s self-storage management software, and we’re providing ongoing PPC management and SEO services. Oh, and we designed and built an awesome Flash piece that allows users to choose the right size storage unit.

When it comes to venture capital, we’ve worked with almost every venture capital firm in Utah, and some outside the state as well. Plus I’ve had plenty of dealings as an entrepreneur with VC firms and angel investors and when I was a college student at BYU I won the business plan competition there, so I know a bit about the industry.

In the legal industry we’ve worked with several law firms providing everything from website design to SEO to content management. We’ve created micro-sites to bring in leads for a specific class-action lawsuit, and we’ve done overall marketing for firms like Strong & Hanni and Siegfried & Jensen.

Due to our experience in these three areas, we’ve created three new pages on our site to promote our experience and show off our work in those industries.

• Self Storage
• Venture Capital
• Law Firms

Once again, this doesn’t mean we’re only focusing on these industries and don’t want clients from other industries, it just means we have something additional we can offer these niches beyond the normal and phenomenal services we provide everyone else.

Although we’re still ironing out a few kinks, it’s probably done enough that we can announce the launch of a new ecommerce site for one of our clients, TIW Jewelry, who is selling tungsten rings online under the simple brand “Tungsten”. We developed the branding elements, the website design, and coordinated the ecommerce integration for the website. The website, at TungstenRingsforMen.com, uses Magento for ecommerce.

I’m not 100% sold on Magento, but I have to admit I’m fairly impressed with it so far, especially since we’ve had some horrible experiences with other ecommerce platforms in the past. Magento was relatively inexpensive to implement, and is fairly simple to administer. It also includes a decent set of features to aid with SEO efforts, which is critical for this client.

We’ll also be doing ongoing SEO work for this client. Of course it doesn’t hurt to have a domain with some good keywords in it. We just barely started and their site is already #9 in Google for “tungsten rings for men”. Of course we really want to get the rankings for “tungsten rings” which they only rank at #85 for, but give it a month or two and we’ll see where things are at.

We just finished up some brand development work for a corporate training company called Emerald City Enterprises. Going through the process has reminded me of how much I like simple brands. Not that there isn’t a place for brands that are more…whatever they are, but I like simple, timeless brands like the Gap, Banana Republic, Nordstrom, etc. What’s interesting about a lot of the brands I would call timeless is that they have no logomark.

For you lay people, a logomark is the symbol part of a logo. For Target it’s the target. For Etrade it’s the two arrows that look like an asterisk. And for so many companies from the dot-com era it’s some meaningless symbol. Sure, it might have meaning for the founders, but nobody else.

The word part of the logo is called the logotype, and many companies have done away entirely with having a logomark and just have a logotype. There are a few reasons why I like just using a logotype to brand a company:

1. KISS – Keep it simple, stupid, less is more, etc. There are a number of cliché statements that could be used to address the situation. Essentially the idea is that if you give the human brain less to process when it sees a logo, the logo will be more memorable. If the human brain has to remember a symbol as well as a name, then that’s more to remember than just the name itself.

2. Logomark vs. logotype – If you wanted your customers to remember the symbol or the name of your company, which would you choose? In most cases you’d prefer they remember your name. But symbols are easier to remember than names. So remove the symbol, and then they’ll have to remember the name, and your name will be branded more quickly than it would be otherwise.

3. It’s a lot easier to design and designers can be pretty lazy sometimes. Oh, did I just say that out loud?

Recently we’ve been providing some business/brand strategy consulting to an Internet startup. A non-disclosure agreement prevents me from revealing anything about the company/idea, but I think some of the principles of branding that have been discussed in our meetings might be of more general interest, and therefore I have published here some of the advice I’ve given to this client.