Brent Petterson wanted to start a new business selling a hot new product and was referred to me. Here is the process we went through.
Branding
First we worked on selecting a name. This is not a task to be taken lightly. Brent needed a name that was short and memorable. We focused on green since it is all the rage right now to "go green." We wanted to focus on the fact that he specializes in heat pumps to distingiush his company from the other local heating and air companies.
We came up with a tagline to add to his logo, so that everyone can quickly tell what he does and where he does it.
Color was easy... None of the other local heating and air companies used green as their color and it was in the name, which makes the name visually even easier to remember and if people can remember it they will be more likely to go to them when they need services that they provide.
Then we created the logo using LogoYes.com, which is a great tool for DIY logos and made the logo process fast. I then helped Brent by making some business cards.
Domain
Selecting a domain is increasingly challenging. Domains need to be so easy to spell that they can be told verbally in radio ads or over the phone without having to be spelled. GreenPump.com would have been our first choice, but it was taken so we selected something just as easy to remember and used the common "go green" phrase to come up with GoGreenPump.com.
The Site
For the site we wanted a clean and light color scheme. We used RocketTheme's Meridian template and modified the accent colors to match the green in his logo.
I recommended that Brent sign up with RingCentral to have greater control over his "phone image," but he needed a nice local phone number, since in his small-town market they are extremely loyal to local businesses and recognize phone prefixes. So he signed up with Qwest for a local number and with RingCentral and then we ported the Qwest number over to RingCentral, which canceled his Qwest account. This allowed us to add click-to-call to the phone number on his site, which is statistically proven to offer a slight increase in sales by increasing availability.
I added a slideshow to pretty up the site and made sure visitors are first greeted by a smiling face to create a sense of friendliness and give the site some humanity, making the site more personal. It is nice to get as much info about a visitor as possible, but people avoid filling out lengthy forms. A "quick form" was added to make it as easy and as likely as possible to gather leads.
