Recently I was perusing design articles online and came across a wonderful piece about the evolution of images in a digital landscape. The article included the following quote that I want to share with you today:

You now have to decide what 'image' you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities and they can make or break them in the marketplace - David Ogilvy

David Ogilvy was a tycoon and is often credited as being the father of advertising. So yeah, he was a big deal and is a good person to take advice from.

His remarks on images are spot on and they can be applied to pretty much any industry or business type, no matter what form of images they use.

One of my favourite parts of building a website is selecting the images that will be included in the various pages. This is a hugely important step because website images cannot be overlooked. They are one of the main pillars of your overall brand identity and they greatly define how your audience perceives you (and your brand) online.

Web Design/DevelopmentCharlotte O'HaraApril 24, 2017images, seoComment

Backing up your Squarespace website: here's what you need to know

As a web designer/developer, one of the questions I’m asked all the time is how to protect and back up a website.

This is a valid question that many business owners have. After all, a website is the online home of any business so it’s necessary that it stays live and up to date at all times.

If you've been read any articles through my blog or worked with me in the past, you'll know I'm a huge fan of SS (here’s why). It's a wonderful platform for many reasons but as you'd expect, it differs from other content management systems like Wordpress in several ways. One of the key differences is how website are backed up and not everyone understands how Squarespace protects live content. They also aren’t sure what responsibilities, if any, fall on Squarespace users and the website’s manager and what Squarespace takes care of itself.

We’re going to clear all that up today so that you can feel confident that your website will be safe and protected.

I’ll explain what it means to back up your website, and also show you how I back up my own Squarespace website, as well as the other websites I manage.

Should your website have a sidebar?

Let's rewind and think back to the websites of yesteryear. Were your favourite websites around? How did those sites/blogs look? If you can remember those early days, you'll probably recall that they almost all had sidebars. Heck, sometimes there were even multiple sidebars on either side of the page content!

It was a chaotic time, to say the least.

Fast forward a few years and we see that most websites nowadays favour a clean, uncluttered aesthetic.

There's a simple reason for this: the rise of the smartphone and other devices.

Before we dig into the question "should your website have a sidebar?", let's have a quick history lesson.

Web Design/DevelopmentCharlotte O'HaraApril 11, 2017web design, sidebarComment

Favicons: how to create one in Canva and upload it to your Squarespace website - video tutorial

f you're anything like me, you dream about laser focus and working on one task at a time. However, if truth be told, you're a multi-tasker.

In my case, this shows itself all the time when I'm browsing the internet or doing work online. Take a quick look at my browser and at any given time I'll have at least half a dozen (if not more!) browser tabs open. It's a cluttered mess and it can be hard to keep track of all the websites I have open.

Here's where favicons come into play. Favicons are the small icon on each browser tab associated with a website and they're one of the quickest ways to tell websites apart when you have many tabs open. They're a way to fully distinguish and brand your website and they are a design element that should not be overlooked.

Not only are they super cute and useful, they're also incredibly easy to create and upload to your website!

I've created a short video tutorial to go along with this post to show you how easy it is to create a favicon using Canva and then how to upload it to your Squarespace website.

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Thank you!