Especially in these economically uncertain times, people crave the stability of large, established brands – it’s a matter of trust and confidence.  Smaller companies can look a riskier prospect by comparison, and sometimes a prospect will dismiss you out of hand simply on first impressions.    

It’s here that branding plays such a vital role.  Creative brand design can help you to ‘punch above your weight’ – if you look big,  customers won’t worry about whether you are small.  Look at Innocent, a classic example of a start-up that quickly bloomed into a market leader.

Size doesn’t matter in brand design, because the tools are the same whoever you are – graphics, icons, colours and fonts, values and messages.  It takes the application of strategy and creativity to find an image appropriate to your services and markets, which will attract prospective customers and give them trust to do business with you.

Websites are a case in point.  Statistically, a visitor will decide in seconds if they have arrived in the right place.  This decision is based on gut instinct, so it’s essential to play on visitor psychology.  Two of the key questions they ask themselves, often subconsciously, are “Is this what I expected?” and “Do I trust this site?”

If your website looks small – if it’s been knocked up over lunch using off-the-shelf software – then the visitor’s decision will be easy.  Click ‘back,’ move on to the next Google search result.

Even companies that have been around for a few years can look feeble if they have failed to move with the times.  A website that looks old – say, if it uses outdated coding or the news hasn’t been updated since 2005 – suggests a company that is too poor to invest in its own brand.

[Speaking of money, what’s important to stress is that brand design doesn’t cost as much as you think.  Sure – if you hire a fancy-pantsLondonagency, you’ll pay for it.  But good design isn’t about overheads but ideas, and ideas cost nothing.  The only thing you should be paying for is expertise – specifically, to ensure that your branding isn’t just pretty pictures but reflects your corporate values and encourages your target audience to take a chance on you.]

So imagine a different scenario, one where the visitor is presented with an eye-catching logo, inspirational photography, clean design and an immediate mission statement, then you’ll hold the visitor’s attention.  Trust and expectation will be met; you look like a company that knows what it’s doing.

Obviously, good brand design isn’t enough.  A pretty website without substance is just as big a sin as a useful but unattractive one.   It needs to be backed up with engaging messages and clear calls to action so that the visitor has a reason to stick around and, ideally, get in touch to talk business.

Nonetheless, brand design is your ambassador – and, crucially, it is an ambassador that can travel wherever your brand needs to be.  A bold corporate identity, consistent across your website and all marketing literature, can work wonders in supersizing your brand image.  Once prospective customers start to see you everywhere, they will join the dots… and the picture they draw will be of a shark, not a minnow. 

Even when those prospective customers turn up at your premises for that crucial meeting and see you’re not the huge operation they were expecting… well, if your signage and reception matches the image they’ve already seen, their initial trust and positivity will be reassured.

Far from feeling duped, they’ll feel that the extra effort you’ve put into your brand highlight your ambition and capability.  A company that cares about its brand design will also care about its customers.

By looking big and thinking big, it won’t be long before you are big.

Other firms such as Benetton and more recently Paddy Power use shock tactics to ensure that their advertising creates as much of a buzz in the news headlines as it does on the fashion and sports pages.

However, in a bid to gain publicity, some organisations take their quest a step too far and cross that invisible line between controversial and down right stupid.  Today has seen discount website VoucherDigg cross that line, using a picture of missing Madeleine McCann to advertise discounted holidays to Portugal.

The picture itself is the one released by Madeleine’s parents, Gerry and Kate, in the hours after her disappearance. While they’ve done everything they can to keep her in the news over the past five years, I’m sure most people will agree that this is not how they want her image to be used. 

There’s no question that this high profile campaign has inextricably linked Madeleine and Portugal, but is it really wise to remind people of a missing child on a holiday website?  People booking family holidays look for certain qualities and their children’s safety will come top of that list. To remind sun seekers of a holiday that tore one family apart with the loss of their eldest child and the very public failure of the Portuguese Police to find her seems a bizarre way to try and sell a family break in the very region where she disappeared.

It will be interesting to see how the ASA reacts to this, because in March 2011, its CAP Code was extended to cover marketing messages online.  The CAP code states that ‘individuals should be protected from unwarranted infringements of privacy’ and that marketers are required to obtain written permission for ‘referring to or portraying a member of the public or his or her identifiable possessions’. It goes on to say that ‘…Marketers must not use a shocking claim or image merely to attract attention’.

While the image of Madeleine McCann may not in itself be shocking, the back story behind it certainly is and it can only be assumed that VoucherDigg have used it to ‘merely attract attention’.

That seems to be the view of Gerry and Kate too, because according to the Daily Mail, they have called in top law firm Carter-Ruck to demand the removal of the picture.

Whether the picture was posted in error, as a publicity stunt, or as some commentators have suggested, due to a hacker, in this case the quicker the picture comes down the better; otherwise VoucherDigg may find themselves on the receiving end of a public backlash that belies the phrase ‘all publicity is good publicity’.

As our last post indicated, we’ve been incredibly busy over the past few weeks on a raft of exciting projects for clients new and old.  However, in blogging terms, all your visitors will see is the online version of ‘radio silence,’ so it’s time to restate the principles of long-term blogging.

There will always be occasions when, for whatever reason, you won’t have the time to conjure up a blog post.  But if you’re serious about blogging, it shouldn’t be a luxury that you do ‘as and when’ but a necessary part of your marketing to commit to all-year-round.

In some ways, you need to treat your own business as if it is another of your customers.  They wouldn’t expect you to miss a delivery or deadline – so why put up with it from yourself?

Under these circumstances, it pays to have a library of non-topical stories in reserve, which can be quickly scheduled to cover periods when your staff doesn’t have the time to react to industry trends or provide pitchy comment on the day’s news.

What constitutes a good non-topical blog?  Obviously, subject matter should be relevant to your readership but there are several ways you can approach blogging that should help you to brainstorm good ideas that don’t need to be published there and then.

Case Studies – Whatever your business, you want readers to regard you as an expert in your field. There’s no better way of doing this than to showcase past achievements, so delve into your business back catalogue and remind your website visitors how you got to where you are today.

Anecdotes – If your business is more abstract than “we provided product X to customer Y,” then think laterally.  How do you get people interested in your services?  Try using everyday examples that can bring your work to life in relatable, real-life ways. If you can get people to stop and think, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that!” or “I know exactly what that feels like!” then half the battle is won.

Advice – It’s easy to be cautious when blogging.  Surely, if you tell everybody how to do what you do, they’ll have no need to hire you for the purpose? Counter-intuitively, though, the most successful bloggers tend to be the ones who give away the most about their methods.  Just because people have access to a birthday cake recipe doesn’t mean that everybody has the time, inclination or talent to bake that cake. By imparting knowledge, really you’re providing the trust that you can deliver what they need.

Opinion – While it’s preferable for news releases and other PR activity to be neutral in tone and factual in content, blogs are an ideal arena in which to showcase your expertise in a more personal way.  This doesn’t necessarily mean having a rant: controversy tends to generate an immediate spike in traffic, followed by a long-term dip in reputation.  Yet it’s not hard to balance wit with wisdom, and to demonstrate professional values in a conversational and engaging manner.  If you’re passionate about your work, don’t be shy in shouting about it.

Follow these tips, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be blogging all the time.  Just make you’ve built up your stockpile of pre-written blogs before the inevitable deluge of hard work and you’ll be ready to parcel them out as needed!

After a glorious new client win this month, we have been working non-stop on designing, developing and writing SEO content for a brand spanking new corporate website.

With additional new business pitches, exhibitions stands to construct at MACH 2012, plus more work for a soft drinks company whose latest innovation has been gathering pace since FoodEx, our time to spend on our own PR has been limited.

We are proud of being able to offer marketing news and opinion to our website visitors, but when that perfect storm of work, work and more work hits, we had to make a decision.  News stories or blogs?

It was a tough call, but rightly or wrongly we came down on the side of news stories, feeling that news needs to be told now, whereas the wisdom of our blogs is timeless.

So, we apologise profusely and will be back in the blogosphere shortly.

What he painted endures because not only because it is an awe-inspiring, transcendental work of art, but because it is bang on-message – and that couldn’t have happened without a really good marketing brief.

Consider the alternatives.

- Please paint the ceiling

On such a limited brief, you’re going to get limited results because only a decorator in a white van would bother taking the call. Masters of Renaissance art need not apply. 

- Please paint it using yellow, red and green.

Adding an extra detail, here a colour scheme, goes some way towards clarifying things. So the Church doesn’t want magnolia? Great, let’s get creative.

- We have terrible problems with damp and cracks in the ceiling, and would be ever so grateful if you would just cover it up.

That’s the ‘why’ sorted, but not the ‘what.’ C’mon, Pope Julius II, that ceiling doesn’t just keep out the rain. It’s also an amazing location for a billboard to deliver a message for all eternity.

- Please paint the ceiling incorporating some/all of: God, Adam, cupids, devils, saints.

Finally, an element of content, although the tone and style remain elusive. Who is the target audience? What’s the message you want to convey?

- Please paint it for the greater glory of God and as an inspiration and lesson to his people. Create frescoes which depict the creation of the world, the Fall, man’s degradation by sin, the divine wrath of the deluge and the preservation of Noah and his family. 

That’s more like it. When do you want it by?

Sound familiar? If this replicates your own experience, fear not.  Even the biggest brands are still arguing about what social media can do for your company.  At the recent annual conference of advertisers’ body ISBA, the pundits become locked in a war of words on social media strategy.

Philip Gladman, a marketing director at drinks giant Diageo, claimed that it wasn’t worth bothering with social media unless you were willing to invest time, money and resources into building one million followers.  Any less, he claims, and you may as well pump your efforts into TV advertising.

Unless you happen to be one of the world’s biggest brands, we doubt that your Facebook or Twitter pages will get anywhere that figure – but don’t worry.  Most people were quick to rebuff Gladman’s claims as a “vanity metric.” It’s far better, according to the majority of experts, to prioritise quality above quantity when it comes to building a social media following.

Which is handy – because that’s our view at McConnells too!  Engagement lies at the heart of social media. Rather than treating the acquisition of followers as a popularity contest, it’s important to cultivate contacts who will contribute towards your overall business objectives.

The big question, of course, is what those objectives should be.  Social media offers direct communication with an opt-in audience – in other words, they have voluntarily agreed to receive your messages, so it’s counter-productive to bombard them with too much hard-sell advertising.  Followers will be stung by the lack of respect, and depart from your Facebook page or Twitter feed as quickly as they arrived.

It’s the absence of traditional advertising logic in social media that has flustered many. The ‘hot topic’ at the ISBA Conference was about how to get a return on investment from social media.  Philip Gladman’s point was based entirely on the premise that you need huge numbers in order to achieve a substantial sales spike – but it’s not that simple.

Yet if social media is not about selling, what is it for?

As one delegate at the ISBA Conference put it, it’s about “brand health.” A lively social media community helps to demonstrate customer attitudes and behaviour; over time, these can be tracked to show how your company is performing.

The benefits of social media are therefore two-fold.  On the one hand, it provides a vital public relations role, in which a company can disseminate its news and values as part of a co-ordinated brand management campaign.  By giving a platform for your customers to respond to your initiatives, and being willing to maintain that dialogue, you can achieve an impressive ‘buzz’ that your followers will take into the real world. 

On the other hand, the knowledge acquired from an engaged social media following is incredibly useful in terms of knowing what your customers need and expect, and therefore provides data that can be fed into the development of new products and services.  Facebook, in particular, is an ideal arena for launching new initiatives via promotional offers or viral videos.

So contrary to claims about the million follower club, there are plenty of ways to harness the power of social media.  The important thing, though, is to know what you want before you set out, and to be realistic about those objectives.

Nike sparked outrage when it decided to call its limited edition St Patrick’s Day trainer ‘Black and Tans’ – a provocative choice of name for the Irish, giving that it refers to a bloody paramilitary organisation responsible for one of the nation’s darkest periods.

Hot on the heels of that debacle, Kraft launched a new name for its global snack business, Mondelez – coined from the French words for ‘world’ and ‘delicious’ – only to find out that for Russian speakers, the brand name resembled slang for oral sex.

Surely, such anecdotes provide no more than a momentary giggle?  Not so: getting a brand name wrong can have disastrous consequences.  The history of branding is littered with similar examples, both genuine and hearsay, where reputation suffers.  The unfortunate moniker of Pen Island(www.penisland.net) continues to spawn schoolboy sniggers, while people still think that Powergen set up an Italian website called powergenitalia.com, even though this urban myth has been thoroughly debunked.

So what lessons can be learnt from these mistakes, and how should a company set about choosing a brand name for its business and its products?

The trend these days is to create an identity around a short, punchy word, but it is fraught with difficulty.  As anybody who has seen The Apprentice will know, these names are arbitrary and interchangeable.  Once Alan Sugar starts to switch around the contestants, any original meaning is lost and the ‘brands’ become anonymous.  Be honest: can you remember anything about past Apprentice ‘brands’ Renaissance, Eclipse, Ignite or Synergy?

Sure, the likes of Orange get away with it but it took many years and millions of pounds to burn their identity into our consciousness via the memorable ‘The future’s bright, the future’s Orange’ tagline.  Worse, the more companies out there who adopt this approach means that these supposedly quirky, distinctive brands become white noise.

Bear in mind, too, that nowadays prospective customers are more likely to find you via Google.  It makes no sense, for example, for a plumbing company to call itself Mahogany. 

The alternative is the Ronseal approach.  As in, choose a name that ‘does what it says on the tin.’  It’s certainly useful for SEO.  If you make Industrial Floor Mops and decide to call yourself just that, you’re likely to hit the top of the rankings on Google soon enough. 

On the downside, it’s a bit of a mouthful.  Your logos and idents are going to be cluttered, and you’re also hamstrung should you wish to diversify.

And if you’re afraid that a practical name might sound boring, consider Compare The Market.  The dullest, most functional brand name imaginable, but it did the trick in capturing customers because it sounds like a search term that people would type into Google.  And, of course, when they took that idea as far as it would go, they refreshed it by bringing in the meerkat – a move which not only cemented the original brand’s market-leading position but generated its own spin-off merchandising industry!

By now, you’ve probably realised that there is no silver bullet when it comes to choosing a brand name that works.  Correct! So much of the work done in branding relies on other communication channels – the impact of media advertising, the drip-feed of news via PR – to build up awareness of your firm and what it does.

Getting it right requires hard work and patience.  Yet there are several things you can do straight away to minimise the chances of getting it wrong:

Brainstorm – sometimes, a company founder will be too close to spot strong ideas, which is one reason why so many companies are named after their founders.  Ask your friends, trusted business contacts, even your intern for their input, and you might discover some surprisingly strong suggestions.

Check Facts – seriously, has Nike never heard of Wikipedia? A quick Google search will pick up the most blatant potential faux pas, although the nuances of foreign languages are harder to pick up on (especially if you’re making up a word, a la Mondelez).

Test – create focus groups, or simply ask your friends, what your preferred brand name says to them.  If their feedback is out-of-sync with the brand values you wish to get across, it’s a no-go. 

Write It Down – it’s all very well calling yourself Who Represents? until your customers realise that your website looks like it says Whore Presents (and, sadly, that’s a real-life example).  And if you get bored typing out a long URL, chances are your target audience will, too.

Get Creative – a brand name does not exist in isolation.  Think about how your potential name will relate to your marketing literature, signage and other branding.  A strong logo can do enough heavy lifting to turn a potentially weak brand name into a world beater.     

Keep It Clean – in the film The Social Network, there’s a scene where computing geek Mark Zuckerberg has a meeting with Internet entrepreneur Sean Parker about his new social media venture, The Facebook.  Parker proffers the best branding advice anybody’s ever given.  “Drop the ‘the.’ Just ‘Facebook.’ It’s cleaner.”

Follow all of this advice, and you’ll probably come up with a brand name that reflects the products and the personality of your business, and won’t trip too many alarms when it goes live.

Nonetheless, there’s one final bit of advice that can help you to get your branding bang on

Use An Agency – time is money, and if you’re starting a company or launching a product, most of your time is going to be focussed elsewhere.  By passing on the branding work to an expert, you’ll benefit from a fresh eye, years of marketing knowhow and recommendations on how to integrate your brand name into a wider marketing strategy.

With the right brand name, you don’t need to be Orange to ensure a bright future.

Here’s the text of an email you’ve probably seen dozens of times, promising instant benefits from link building:

- Get links into your website!
- Guaranteed front page of Google!
- All for only $250 a month!

In theory, all of this sounds amazing.  Google loves spotting inbound links that go into your website.  Indeed, link building is one of the primary means by which the search engine determines the value of a website. 

Yet you should beware of companies who promise so much for so little.  For those prices, it’s doubtful they’d have the time or resources to create targeted, relevant and valuable link building into your website.

It’s far more likely that what they are offering is a scattergun approach to link building, hoping that the sheer volume of links will produce valid results. The majority of links will be from websites that exist solely as link building depositories.  In other words, nothing will be unique or special about your link, as hundreds of other firms will have referrals from exactly the same places.  

Just as we tend to trust a word-of-mouth recommendation from a friend over being ‘cold-called,’ search engines also score inbound links based on whether they come from a recognised and reputable referrer.  Increasingly, therefore, Google is penalising link building warehouses, partly because it is so easy to ‘rig’ but mainly because, in real-life, you’re not going to get high-quality traffic from such places.

It’s like holding a party and inviting the phone book in the hope that enough entertaining people will attend – but, deep down, you know you’ll only get the misfits and rejects who nobody wants to talk to.

In other words, treat your link building strategy as if you are inviting people to a party, and spend time targeting those locations that can add value – and relevant traffic – to your website with an endorsement.

At McConnells, our link building strategy always take into account the principles of VAVA (Volume, Authority, Velocity and Anchor Text).  If your links meet all four of these standards, you will do well in the search rankings.

Volume: Yes, despite everything said before, you can’t ignore quantity, as the number of links pointing at your site has an impact on your rankings.  Yet there’s no need to hoover up hundreds or thousands, as long as you’re beating your competitors.

Authority: Do you have links that are credible? A referral from influential, widely-read and/or high-ranking sources such as the BBC or a national newspaper is worth more than a hundred dodgy links farmed out haphazardly from an anonymous link building factory. 

Velocity: How quickly are you acquiring new links and how does this compare to your competitors and the market place?  Too much, too soon and Google knows you’re trying to jump the queue through high-volume link building.  Too few or infrequent, and Google will assume your site lacks influence.  The ideal is somewhere in between – a gradual but consistent growth in referrals from highly-rated websites. 

Anchor Text:  Search engines rely on websites explaining the relevance of a link by embedding it within explanatory text, like this.  The anchor text will help your search ranking for that word or phrase, so ideally, this text should reinforce your preferred marketing messages, whether it’s your brand name (McConnells) or a specific product or service you offer (online marketing). 

As you can see, cultivating good link building isn’t a matter of farming out dozens of links higgledy-piggledy.  It takes patience and strategic thinking, and requires as much knowledge of online PR as it does of search engine optimisation tactics. 

Crucially, the long game pays off.  By making the ongoing acquisition of high-quality links part of your online marketing strategy, you will benefit from better search engine rankings as well as valuable web traffic from targeted and relevant referring sites.

Think back to last time one of your employed (rather than entrepreneurial) friends was moaning about work. Chances are, they were moaning about how their boss just doesn’t get it. How it is blatantly obvious that something whether a system, a process or a product, needs changing to make it better, more efficient or more economical. But nothing is ever done.

Chances are though that if you probe a little deeper, that friend has told everyone who’ll listen, their fellow employees, you, their mum, partner and even the dog. Everyone, that is, except the boss. So of course, he or she keeps on blissfully unaware that something could be improved.

Listening to your employees is not only the cornerstone of a good internal PR strategy, it can be hugely beneficial to your business. It can identify problems or take you in directions that you’ve never thought of. 

If you don’t believe me then here’s an example given at a talk I attended by crisis management specialist Michael Bland. He vividly described watching a manager, who thought his staff would have nothing to add to the discussion, turn white as an employee outlined his fears about how a simple accident could escalate into a environmental catastrophe. The employee was right and the manager hadn’t thought of the scenario.

Had the accident happened, you can imagine the headlines when the staff member concerned explained to the eager press how he’d feared this for years, but no one had listened – something that could have destroyed the firm’s otherwise excellent reputation.

By simply having that discussion, those headlines will never happen, because the company was able to put in new policies place and buy additional safety devices that, should an accident happen, prevent it from turning into a disaster.

Furthermore by listening and acting on their contributions, employees feel valued, which leads to a happier work force and a lower staff turnover. Remember though, if there’s a reason for not doing something explain why, otherwise it’ll have the opposite effect.

What’s more, rather than moaning about the pitfalls of working for you and your company, your staff will become invaluable ambassadors for your brand.

So how do you do it?  The key is to give employees a platform to express their ideas, concerns and issues.  There are a wealth of different tools that can be used to communicate effectively with staff, ranging from meetings, workshops and (sorry) brainstorming sessions, to intranet (internal websites), questionnaires and anonymous comment or suggestion boxes.

One manager I know even has reverse appraisals, where his employees appraise his performance. His wife says he’s unbearable to live with while it’s happening and his mood worsens whenever she agrees with his staff, which apparently is quite often. Ultimately though he says it’s invaluable and once he’s got over his pique he’s a much better manager – until the next year’s appraisal that is!

A spider isn’t an interior designer. He’s a predator. So while his home might look sleek and stylish, its real purpose is to ensnare the curious bugs that fly in to take a closer look and – wham! – they’re caught in the web.

Given its name, it is surprising that so few companies treat their website like a web.  Their website design is focused on making pretty pictures, with flash animations, colourful graphics and funky logos.  Trouble is, nobody ever sees it because the site hasn’t been optimised to attract search engines – and nobody who manages to visit sticks around because there’s no substance behind the style.

It’s time to treat your website design the way a spider treats its web.  In other words, as a trap.  Its threads need to be woven far and wide, everything needs to be sticky, and the ultimate aim is to feed your belly with increased business.

Fortunately, there’s one unifying principle by which all of these things can be achieved.  Online, content is king – the means by which new visitors will find you, stick around to find out more, get in touch and maybe even recommend your site to their peers.

The snazziest website design will mean nothing unless you follow these simple steps towards good web content:

Be Interesting – if you’re falling asleep writing about your business, what hope is there for prospective customers to read it? Write with passion and knowledge.

Think Like A Customer – if you wanted to buy your own product or service, what would you search for?  These are the all-important ‘keywords’ that people will type into Google, and your web content should reflect.

Balance The Demands Of Readers And Robots – search engines will measure every web page to assess its keywords based on frequency…but nobody wants to read something stuffed full of spammy marketing messages.  Focus on one or two keywords per page, and aim for a density of about 3-5%.

Spread Things Out – you probably have many products and services. Great: add a new page for every one, each optimised to a different keyword so that visitors will arrive on the right page.

Keep Writing – search engines increasingly value those sites that continue to add web content.  Post news stories about your latest deals and achievements, or start a blog where you can share your wisdom and opinions on your market.

Good website design should be in the service of your content, and can help it to achieve its goals. 

Website Design for Search Engines

The emphasis you place on the position and prominence of content can help search engines to find you more easily.  Use the ‘page title’ (the block of text that appears right at the top of your screen) to convey a pithy, punchy statement of the page’s content – this is what will appear in search engine results.

It pays to add a strong meta description, a hidden piece of code that can be used to further summarise your business and why somebody should click through.  This text will appear underneath the page title in search results.

Similar to meta description, you can add ‘hidden’ meta tags which act as virtual keywords for your page.  Although many search engines have stopped paying attention to meta tags, they offer another ‘tick box’ for helping to integrate website design with content.

Secondary on-page headings and titles can be boosted using <h> tags – the <h> stands for highlighted, and allows you to increase the size and boldness of key messages.  Crucially, search robots regard any text in <h> as important.

Website Design for Visitors

The second key element of website design is to ensure that web content is easy to read and navigate once a visitor has found you.  Please, no dayglo colour schemes or dark backgrounds!  Anything that causes a headache or strained eyes isn’t going to win you new business.

Menus must also be clearly located in strong, intuitive positions – notably, across the top and down the left-hand side of your page – so that visitors can find their way around.

If there’s somewhere specific you want to direct the visitor to – a special offer, or a contact form – create a ‘call to action’ through attention-grabbing graphics and copy.

And remember, check every link: if a visitor can’t get through because a link is broken or incorrect, they’ll simply leave the site.

Website Design for Sharing

Make your content shareable.  It’s easy nowadays to add buttons to all content, allowing visitors to subscribe to your news feed via RSS, or recommend a page on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. 

Again, it’s worth ensuring that there are plenty of links to other relevant pages on your website to maximise chances of new visitors sticking around. 

Put simply, if your content is engaging, well written and properly optimised, every single page is a potential landing page for new visitors.  Website design must reflect that by drawing attention to your content, not to its own sense of style.