The 2011 Appletree Christmas Card Awards

Here’s what you’ve been waiting for! The 2011 Appletree Christmas Card Awards! I made a number of awards last year, for the best, worst, cleverest and most pointless Christmas card – click here to read that blog. Now I’m delighted to announce the winners of the competition for Christmas 2011. The winner of Best and [...]

How do you create a consistent brand? Try Electric Hair!

What does having electric hair have to do with creating a consistent brand for your business? Electric Hair was set up by Mark Woolley, whose aim is for the business to become known as the best hair dressing brand in the UK. With salons in London, Brighton and Reading, the Oxford salon was opened earlier [...]

Web-attractiveness isn’t necessarily good design

Reading through the LinkedIn Groups a question grabbed my attention. It was a lady who was obsessed with setting up a series of fancy designed monetized blogs. As well as wavering on which kind of blogging platform to use, she was very concerned about the design, as well as keen to start making money. Unfortunately [...]

The importance of good design

There is nothing more off-putting than going to a networking group, finding an interesting prospect, asking for their card and receiving something that is obviously from Alta Vista, when your initial concept was that they were a thoroughly professional outfit successfully doing business left, right and centre. How you present yourself shouldn’t only be limited [...]

Watch out for our new website

We’re building a brand new website for Appletree, so I thought I’d let you know how we’re doing it and how we do it for clients. The first thing we did was to ask ourselves lots of questions about how we want our new site to look. We looked other websites that we really like [...]

Why boring adverts don’t work

Advertising is having a difficult time at the moment, as there is a ‘rumour’ going about that it doesn’t work. Well, that is true if your advert is rubbish, and believe me, there are plenty of rubbish adverts out there! Chantal gave me one to comment on yesterday, which was particularly bad. For starters it [...]

Don’t use WordArt in your PowerPoint presentations

Quite a few years ago, when people discovered PowerPoint and how useful it was for creating presentations, there was a trend for throwing as much into a presentation as possible. In went the bullet points that whizzed in from left and right. In went the images that spiralled round until they settled in the right [...]

Does a brand need a logo?

The instantaneous reaction to the word ‘brand’ cultures up a logo, a symbol which is recognisable for that company. It is an image or shape that becomes memorable (as long as there is sufficient awareness) and resonates with its customer base to stimulate recognition and acts as its identification. But logos aren’t always symbols, quite [...]

It’s not good to make your website flashy

I saw a question on LinkedIn that asked how to optimise a website’s homepage that consisted purely of Flash. Flash is a programme that provides animation with images and graphics for websites, and you probably have come across many examples (I did the other day with a digital marketing firm) where you are greeted with a little ‘show’ of [...]

Using analogies to explain the technical bits

Quite a lot of what I do is technical. There was once a time when I didn’t understand what I do, so I had to learn, usually the long and hard way, how to do this technical stuff. Most of the instructions used jargon, and were written for people who were already technical. It infruiated [...]