The making of a brand: Odigo Academy (Pt 2)

So it's decided: Odigo Academy.   It means "Leadership" in Greek and we locked in www.Odigo.Academy.  Next up, the brand, the logo, the 'mark'.  A brand mark is much more than just the graphical logo itself, it's the way the entire brand will be portrayed.  It's easy to make the mistake of grabbing a quick & easy logo, and then come to realize that every time that mark is displayed, it may not accurately reflect the 'style' intended.   Think about everything from your email signature, to the website, to tradeshows, conferences, t-shirts, etc.  Not to mention, the colors in the brand mark will drive a lot of that as well.

Our Chief Creative Officer, Ryan, quickly spun up some amazing samples and at first we toyed with going with a multi-color logo here. The strategy with multiple colors is that each color can serve as the basis or cornerstone to different use cases:   different products, services, verticals, etc.   If we had gone with this one, "blue" could be leadership training for CEO's and green could for "VP's"   Although a great idea, we decided it was overkill for what we were trying to accomplish with the brand, and settled on the mediterranean blue color. It matched the Odigo greek type of name, and happens to be a trending color for 2020, but remains timeless.

After settling on the new logo, the website launch is up next!   We stood up a simple home page at www.Odigo.Academy while the 'real' one is being worked on and the plan will be to have the full site launched next week!

When launching/relaunching a website, here's some things we keep in mind:

• Go for an adaptive/responsive design - with almost unlimited device options now, from phones, to computers, it's important that a website adjust and scale
• Simplicity wins:   simple style, messaging, easy to read, easy to find & use menu
• What's the point: this is a good time for the KISS (keep-it-simple, stupid) principle - if you're trying to get phone calls, make the phone number super easy to find, if you want people to book meetings, have a simple Call-to-action (CTA) for visitors to do so. Just focus on the the goal of your company is.
• Some other rule of thumbs are to have an odd number of menu items (i.e. 3-5-7) and group everything else under one of those menus.  Many visitors will look for a "contact" and "About" page so having those easily accessible is always important.
• Prep for search engine optimization (SEO).   SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, so it takes time, but you have to start with. Every website should cover the basics of focusing on certain keywords, and make sure all the meta tags, headers, descriptions, etc are all set and ready, and make sure every image has a descriptor or 'alt' text, etc.  The first (or next) time that Google or Bing crawl your site, you want to be ready!
•   Bonus tip: prepare to blog!   Google loves fresh content, so prepare to post content occasionally, and really as frequently as you can. It keeps the site fresh for visitors, and computers.

Next week, we'll share more behind-the-scenes branding of our newest leadership development program.