Bush Marketing and Branding

It won't be long before you can experience delicious handmade dip from Byron Sources with brand new spanking labels. For a sneak peak you can visit their new webpage: nakedbyrondips.com

Great work on the funky illustrations Nighean, savory copywriting Kaleigh and tops off to Rachael for her print pre-production. For more information on this great line of all natural dips email Scott Latty at info@nakedbyrondips.com

To whom it may concern:

Briony Moore has worked with Bush Branding & Marketing in 2008 and done a great job: invoicing, accounts receivable, paying bills, market research, event planning, barista, personal assistant and a long list of other things we put in her lap.

Bri is moving back to Adelaide and we wish her well and would welcome the chance to talk to prospective employers about her contributions to our businesses.

Cheers

Greg Cromwell
Bush Branding & Marketing

Here is a photo taken by Jon Sturge in Florida for Blundstone Canada's your story. The Steam Train that I was sitting on for the photo has a story of its own too: Lakeland Number 50 is a standard gauge mogul (2-6-0) that was built by ALCO in 1922. It was used for many years by the Virginia-Carolina Chemical Corporation to haul phosphate rock. The slope-back tender aided in visibility during switching operations. It was taken out of service in 1958 and donated to the city of Lakeland in 1961. The city of Lakeland placed it here in Adair Park. Notice the 5-chime whistle.

Appropriately the boots in the picture are Blundstone CSA Steel Caps. These steel toe Blundstone safety boots are not sold in the United States; however they are available online at the Australian Boot Company.

My associate and friend George Donovan and I have been working together for many years. Well not that many. Tonight we worked on a small project of ours--one of those 'it's for a mate' type jobs. George and I are account men. Collectively we have over 50 years experience working with clients and creatives. Who would have thought Martini lunches and cigars would go out of fashion and we would end up being wannabe web designers and developers.

Here is what went down: George and I are chatting away on Skype and he lets me know he wants to update his mate's website--eokomit is the name of the product--it's a compost and growth accelerant. Comes in a powder form---makes you think you could be Scarface. I digress. Based on the budget and nature of this job it was a perfect fit for joomla. A sort of sand box for me to introduce George to the world of website content management. It's a relatively simple update and George has spent quite a bit of time creating a beautiful text and image document in Word. Sadly I let George know all his fine work kerning and leading in Word was useless to me. Would it be all right if I just used the text. I was hoping to get through this quickly. No that was not going to do.

When George heard me moaning he offered to save the document to html or as a pdf. With respect I let GD know that would be useless. My next request was for the images to be sent separately. No that could not happen. It was down to me saving the images out of word and hoping they would look ok. Luckily GD had finessed them with hours of Photoshop retouching.

The pressure was on me and George made a remark that I might need to hold another joomla day so I could learn how to add images to pages.

After an hour and 15 refresh your browsers- this is what we ended up with. Now I know it's not going to get us on the podium for best of show but we got it done. The best part of all is that we did not need any help from designers or developers. Who says you can't teach old dogs new tricks. Pass the Martini and a Cohiba please. Here is our page of honour-eokomit trial.

Adobe Contribute has become a mainstay solution for our clients. For under $200 you can download a copy of Contribute, enter ftp details or click on a pre-made login key and voila you can start updating a website with confidence.

We have recently completed a redesign for Byron Trees. Our client Alex is a self confessed computer green horn. In one short training session Alex could see how easy managing his website was using Contribute and was instantly sold on managing his newly designed website with it. Look for some comments from Alex in the next few weeks as he gets stuck into some serious site updating.

Speaking of updating I just visited byrontrees.com.au and yikes. Andrew Bleakley was right again. The navigation bar is out of whack in the new version of Firefox 3. With over 7 million people downloading the latest version of this open source browser yesterday it confirms that Firefox is here to stay. As web designers and developers, Firefox is our browser of choice. It has powerful website development tools that make building and maintaining websites a treat.

If only there was a button I could press that would fix display issues...oh well it's no Y2K but we have some work to do.

What business are you in? A good question for a consultant to get clear on before they start shelling out expensive advice. Bush Branding + Marketing, by name, brands and markets businesses. When I came up with our name I thought it was very clever.

Over the ten years we have been in business we have often thought about changing our name. Sadly, we get a lot of requests for burning things into leather and get cheeky references to George W. My latest brain wave is that we are more of a web business then an advertising agency. Web design and development accounts for the majority of our work, and this is the case more then ever.

Back to the subject of this blog: using SEO to help establish what business you are in. Using one of our favourite tools, wordtracker, I researched how people search for web design and developers. Here is the topline data showing word tracker count* by phrase:

web design 2897
website design 1388
web development 1232
website development 645
web site design 312
web page design 235
web design company 206
professional web site design 162
web design and development 124

From this information I know that people are almost twice as likely to search for web design then website design; this is also the case for web development vs. website development. Therefore, it makes sense to position ourselves as a web design and development business as compared to website design and development.

If I was starting all over again I would probably have chosen bush web design and development as a business name to better position us in the market place. Come to think about it I would never have used Bush in our name.

*Count - This shows the number of times a particular keyword has appeared in our database. E.g. Our database currently holds 305,387,995 words. A count of 147 tells us that this particular word has appeared 147 times out of 305,387,995.

The current number of keywords in our database is 305,387,995 searches..

Mail Chimp is our friend. Today we turned around an important email campaign for Rainforest Rescue. It's not everyday you buy and rescue a piece of the Daintree forever. You know you are onto a great web application when you can buy credits, upload your email database, insert a template, design a newsletter, insert content, images and links. Test. Amend. Resend. Fix email client glitches. Send.

Credits to our client Kelvin Davies and his team for great content, fast approvals and a fun get it done attitude. Thanks Andrew and Nighean who head up Bush Branding + Marketing's web design + development team.

Less is more. A saying I use quite often- it also applies to one of my recent rants which is to exlude www. in front of domain names. Why? A picture or two is worth a thousand words: here I am in action at the Australian Boot Company (ABC) in Vancouver. One last saying--practice what you preach.

Some recent collaboration between Rainforest Rescue and Bush Marketing. A big thanks to Adshel for donating the advertising space.

I got to meet a Toronto celebrity recently on a visit to the Australian Boot Company's Queen Street Store. Mark the Litter Guy.

After Andria the store Manager told me about his great work keeping the streets of Toronto clean I was very keen to give him a pair of Blundstones. Which we did. Mark happily replaced his Converse All Stars with his new CSA Approved Blundstone Green Patch boots. Now the Litter Guy can be safe with his steel toes while keeping the streets clean.