Kyrie Bridgewater

I think people who understand the intricacies of human psychology are perhaps the best marketers out there.

Great point you made there on the positioning too.

To create a positive emotional association with your product or service.The mere mention of your brand, product or service can stir up wants and desires. Needless to say, that’s powerful.
To create a brand promise that creates such emotional connections it should be:

• Grounded in the brands core values
• Clearly relevant and engaging to your target market
• Able to create some sort of positive emotional attachment beyond just being “good”
• Repeated internally and externally within your organisation
• Adaptable to the business climate
• Continually reinforced
• Consistent across advertising and marketing media
• Known and echoed by business partners and stakeholders

Delivered Promises

When these promises are delivered and compared to the brands competitors then the punters begin to position your brand in their minds.

What is required in the modern sense of positioning is in depth research of your target audience; to glean a more precis understanding of positioning.

That gives companies a much better understanding of the punter perception of the brand.
Brand Position (as opposed to positioning) is:

The entire collection of thoughts a punter has in their mind about the professional services firm, service or product on offer from you.
Positioning

Positioning is hard work. It is not entirely the domain of a branding, ad agency or media company even though some believe it is.

It is the domain of the CEO and the executive team to align the corporate mission, core values and structure to one that supports punters, connects with them and creates client evangelists.
Open Wallets

Positioning is not what you do to a product; positioning is what you do to the mind of the punter. Win your punters hearts and minds and you will find open wallets.

Take care and get as much joy as you can from everyday. The baldchemist

I love Brian’s blog designs anyway, they lend themselves so great to blogs of all kinds. I will also look at the site you suggested.
You also raised some good pointers there, so thank you for adding to the post.

@ George: I also like colors but I have learned that trying to mix too many would only make a site look like a kaleidoscope and not professional enough. You’ve done well enough with this color scheme. Looks like your wife had you in control there.

Thanks for stopping by. I agree that Monika’s post is excellent.

While I agree that more colors complicate things, sometimes I personally like to see more colors, because I like color. However, my wife often says I should only use 2-3 main colors in my sites. It makes sense, but I still enjoy a lot of bright vibrant colors. And yes that does mean that the design of this blog doesn’t reflect my personality, but it is professional looking which is what I was going for.

As a sometimes designer, I did want to bring up what I consider the most important thing I want to hear from my clients—what is the goal? What exactly is going to determine the success of the website.

I believe that each and every design element should ideally reinforce the mission of the website. It doesn’t always work out that way in practice, but it is what you strive for. Sometimes clients come to me and their goals are a bit fuzzy.

As for colors, one site that is fun to browse is Adobe’s kuler.adobe.com. There you can see palettes that designers have created/voted/commented on. You can even download the palette and email it to your designer for their opinion.

I wholeheartedly agree that its often best to stay with a reduced color palettes—the more colors in play the more complicated the design issues are generally, which usually translates to greater cost.