After putting hundreds of websites live for our clients throughout New Zealand and the Pacific, we've seen a few comments regularly come up when we put our first design draft together. One of the things we often hear is "make our logo bigger" - an understandable request, but one which is not necessarily best practice when it comes to design in general.

One of the first things to understand before looking at logo sizes and placement is that your logo by itself is not your 'brand'. A good logo might become synonymous with a brand (the golden arches for example for McDonalds), but there is alot more that goes into creating a brand than just the logo. 

If you think of one of New Zealand's big brands - "The Warehouse" for example - you'll start to get an understanding of why a logo only makes up a very small part of branding. The Warehouse and their 'big red sheds' bring up certain thoughts straight away - affordable, probably the lowest price you'll find for an item in New Zealand stores, and a money back guarantee. To be honest, I struggle to even visualise the Warehouse logo now as it has changed over time, but I suspect The Warehouse marketing team wouldn't be too upset by that. If a customer can name all those important aspects about the store, but not visualise the logo, then the brand is still a whopping success.

With the above in mind, whenever we are creating a website or any marketing collateral's, we will always think about the broader brand and messaging that we should be conveying. If a logo takes up half the screen, that's a missed opportunity to explain your products, or values, or convey a message to the customer. ​There is no strict rule on logo size, but it needs to balance against the rest of the page and messaging. If you take a look at some established companies logos, you'll quickly notice that they are often only 20-30px in height and don't take up much space on the page at all. That seems counter intuitive to alot of small businesses (and as a small business owner, you will probably want to go a little bit bigger than that), but the reality is that the smaller your logo, the more space available to display your product, services and messages.

You'll also need to consider the style of your logo and style of your site/marketing materials. Taking 543's logo on this website for example, we use a square logo in a sidebar menu. That sidebar menu takes up a bit more space than a conventional navigation menu would, but it also gave us the look that we were hoping for (and an easily navigable site). Because we have a square icon, we needed to have it a little bit larger than we would usually recommend - but that is balanced out by the navigation menu - and if you head to the homepage, you'll see that our messaging dominates the first drop.

Every site is different, and often logos are a different sizes and shapes, so there is no firm rule on how big you should have your logo - but as a general rule...think smaller rather than bigger.

Introduction:
At their core, Weebly and WordPress are both Content Management Systems or CMS’s which let non-technical users edit websites. Both exist in the same basic niche, in that they allow you to create or edit a website, blog or e-commerce store. They both present a range of features to users and have various strengths and weaknesses that we will explore in this article.

Ease of use:
​Weebly
As a cloud hosted service through Weebly Inc, getting started entails getting access to an account by either signing in with your username & password, or signing up with a Weebly Cloud provider like 543 Design. The drag and drop interface makes it extremely easy for non-technical website owners to add or edit content, the idea is that you shouldn’t need to touch any code for most changes.
Pros:

• The built-in features and drag+drop feature makes it very simple to use out of the box
• Weebly provides a great selection of responsive themes included
• A Weebly subscription includes paid technical support who are available to assist with technical issues or basic website updates.

Cons:

• You are somewhat locked to Weebly, however your site can be exported and moved to another web host in a “static” form, or content (blog posts) exported by logging in

WordPress
Provided as open-source (free) software, WordPress can be installed into any standard web host service. It has been around longer than Weebly and it is known for being the tool of choice when it comes to blogging and eCommerce. 
Pros:

• The blog interface, ease of use and functionality like post categories, tags and “pretty URLs” is regarded as industry leading.
• WooCommerce is simple to setup and many themes are built to cater for an eCommerce store.

Cons:

• As a self-hosted site, updates & security patching often need to be managed by the website owner, or a web-developer
• Editing page content can be more involved with page content, widgets and themes all having slightly different ways to edit them
• Initial setup and installation of WordPress is a more involved process, and usually requires more technical skill

From day one, 543 Design made the conscious decision to design in Weebly rather than WordPress. That has given us a unique perspective, and we definitely think that for most small businesses, Weebly is the way to go. In a nutshell:

• The drag & drop interface is MUCH easier for our customers and the average Joe to use than WordPress - it's fantastic and our clients constantly comment about how much they prefer it to their old WordPress CMS.
• The e-Commerce platform is incredibly easy to integrate and is getting better and better every day. Just this week Weebly added new features like 'reviews on products' and 'sale'/'out of stock' label options.
• Blogging is also super simple on Weebly - with tags, search functions and drag & drop editing of blog posts - it's very easy to use.
• The centralised system and Weebly continually updating their platform means you don't have to worry about security and patching etc. As of this week, Weebly also offers free SSL certificates - so all our sites now have that option free of charge.
• Weebly sites seem to perform well in search results out of the box, but the system also gives access to the source code and other important areas for us to really help with client's search engine optimisation.
• Lastly, as a Weebly Cloud developer/designer, we have a direct line to Weebly. That means that we can raise any core issues directly with the CMS provider, and are involved in their discussions on how the platform evolves - it's a great position to be in for our clients.

Weebly really is a fantastic platform and we love working in it. For a really complex build, sometimes we do suggest other platforms, but for 95% of clients out there,  it's the ideal fit.

Get in touch with us if you'd like to get us to build your site, or try giving it a crack yourself direct with Weebly. And if you really want to get fancy, try one of our Weebly Themes (Weebly Templates) - they are really easy to add to your site and give it a whole new level of professionalism.

If you do decide to use WordPress, please get in touch with us and we can recommend a WordPress designer we trust. A big thanks to Keiran from Freeparking (a sister company to our domain provider Discount Domains) - if you have a WordPress site and are looking for a New Zealand web host - either of those companies would be a great place to start looking.

Because we spend every day reading tech articles to keep ahead of the curve, Facebook will often give us 'suggested' posts or pages for tools to help out on websites. We'll tend to give them a test and every now and then one will impress us enough with it's functionality and pricing to start using regularly and recommend to our clients - HotJar seems to fall into that category.

What is HotJar?
In a nutshell, HotJar creates 'heat maps' on your website - showing you exactly where people are clicking, scrolling and moving on different pages on your site. It gives you the ability to quickly understand how people are using your site - which in turn can help you make changes to the site to make it more effective. Below we've given a very brief overview of some of the features and what they do.

The heatmaps
The aspect of HotJar that most people will immediately be drawn to are the heatmaps generated for the site. It shows you how users are interacting with your website design on a computer, mobile and tablet - showing you where they move their mouse, click, and how far down the page they navigate. It can be really intriguing information and if used correctly, should give you an understanding of why your site may or may not be converting into sales. Below are a couple of the heatmaps we generated for our homepage over a few days. What we learned pretty quickly is that twice as many people viewed the site on a computer as a mobile, and next to no-one did on a tablet. That's good info for us - and that stat will no doubt change from industry to industry...but it shows how important the mobile version of a site is. Other than that, what you'll see in the graphics is the attrition rate from the top to the bottom of our single scrolling website. Only about 30% of users make it all the way down to our contact form - which is real food for thought and something we'll put our mind to in tweaking our site in the future. ​

The other features
HotJar comes with a whole stack of other features that some users will really love. You can choose to have each user's journey on your site recorded. This is a fantastic little piece of insight as you can literally sit and watch where the user's mouse tracks on your page. It's an excellent way to see what parts of the site people may be moving away from, where they are trying to click or move on the page, and just in general get an understanding for whether your site is getting used as you want it to be.

Another feature that the HotJar team suggest you use is the 'poll' and 'survey' pop ups - which appear on your site and askusers a question about what they think about the site. We can see the benefit of asking questions of your users (whether there is anything that they want to see on the site, or if they had any issues), but with our site already having a 'sales' point pop up, we didn't want to be too intrusive to people on it so didn't test these particular features.

The final feature that we think alot of clients will get a kick out of is the contact form monitoring tool. By creating a form with HotJar, you will be able to identify exactly where on the form you are possibly losing customers. For websites that utilise a big contact form, that could be extremely useful - helping you refine your forms so that you make sure you hear from everyone who starts to get in touch. Again, with a contact form of only three fields on our site, we didn't give this feature a run, but will do so further down the track.

The verdict
All in all we found HotJar very useful. It's easy to set up (you just need to drop a little snippet of code onto the pages on your site you want to monitor - something easily done by your web team), and the data is pretty instant and understandable. Cost wise, there is a free version for sites with smaller amounts of traffic - which will probably suit most small businesses in New Zealand. We've already had a couple of clients look to start using it, and if you take the time to analyse the data and actually make changes based on that feedback it could be an incredibly powerful tool.

Find out more at HotJar:
https://www.hotjar.com/