The web design industry is constantly evolving and 2024 will be no exception. With new technologies, user preferences, and design standards, web designers are embracing the latest trends and best practices to create websites that are engaging, functional, and attractive. Here, we explore some of the web design trends that we expect to dominate, and how Absolute Media Brisbane can help you implement them on your website.

1. Full-Screen Homepage Hero Section

Full-screen hero sections act like a huge billboard for your website. They immediately capture user attention and deliver a clear communication with few distractions.

A full-screen hero section is a great way to position your business, and to set the scene for your business, brand or product. You of course need an image with meaningful content that adapts to different browser sizes and so avoids being cropped in a way that ruins the design.

Don't worry about putting your content ‘above the fold’. The idea that users won't scroll down to see more information is outdated, as most users are used to scrolling on their devices.

2. Graphics with Photos

You will doubtless have seen images on social media that include graphic overlays. This technique adds creativity, depth and relevance to otherwise regular images. Combining photos with graphics can enhance your brand identity, helps to visually connect your content, and has the added bonus of keeps your website visitors interested in your content, plus done correctly, making it memorable.

3. Responsive Design

Not a new trend, but still a crucial one. Responsive design means that your website adapts to different screen sizes and devices, ensuring consistent and optimal user experience across all platforms. Responsive design is not only important for usability, but also for SEO; Google favours websites that are mobile-friendly and perform well on smartphones and tablets. Absolute Media can help you create a responsive website that looks great and performs well on any device.

4. Dark Mode

Dark mode is a popular option for many users who prefer a darker background for their websites and apps. Dark mode helps reduce eye strain, save battery life, and create a sleek and modern aesthetic. Dark mode can also make your website stand out from the crowd, as many websites still use light backgrounds. Absolute Media can help you design a website that offers dark mode as an option for your visitors, or even as the default theme.

5. Less is More - the Art of Minimalism

Minimalism is a design trend that’s been around for decades but, in the communications industry, it is still very relevant and effective. Minimalism is the art of using less to achieve more. By eliminating unnecessary elements and focusing on the essential ones, minimalism can make your website look clean, elegant, and professional, as well as improve its loading speed and usability. We can help you create a minimalist website that showcases your content and brand without any distractions.

6. Micro-Interactions

On websites, small animations help to provide subtle feedback to your visitors. A good example of this is when a button changes colour when the user hovers their mouse over it. Focussing on these points of micro-interaction on your website, helps bring attention to the details that you ideally want visitors to focus on, and engage. Things like subtle movement, slowly shifting gradients, scrolling animations and parallax, or changes to the mouse icon when you click an element are all possible instances where micro-interaction can be used to great effect.

7. Micro-Animations

Micro animations are extremely useful for holding attention, and guiding users to key aspects of your website. Thinking about how content moves, when loading, when scrolling or swiping, when hovering can bring really effective enhancement to your user experience and present more dynamic qualities, if that’s your thing.

8. Dynamic Cursors

Customizing how users interact with your web elements with the cursor is both a cool and creative way to enhance your users’ experience. Changes the shape of a cursor, it’s colour and how it behaves when key events are triggered works as an effective and albeit sometimes slightly distracting technique which has gained popularity recently.

9. Interactive Content

Interactivity on your website is a great way to get your visitors engage, to pull them deeper into your content, and for your business to find out more about them.

The moment that a visitor starts interacting with your site content, their experience shifts from passive to active, and the conversion experience begins. Think of things that can help your prospects to make informed decisions, and deploy content like interactive event calendars, estimate calculators, animated infographics, questionnaires, resource libraries, maps and survey results to increase the likelihood of generating more new enquiries.

10. Custom Illustrations

Illustrations are an obvious way to make your website more unique and memorable. Illustrated custom-made graphics can also reinforce your brand personality, message, and tone in a creative and engaging way. Illustrations can also bring colour and qualities such as humour and emotion to your website, making it more appealing and relatable to your audience.

These are just some of the web design trends that we expect to dominate, but there are many more to explore and experiment with. If you want to make your website stand out this year, Absolute Media Brisbane can help you with all your web design needs. Contact us today for a free consultation and quote.

When asked 'what do Absolute Media do?', we often first describe our collective services as an outsource marketing department, both for businesses and organisations that don't have one of their own, and those that do but don't have the complete skillset in house.

And with capabilities encompassing digital, print and strategic marketing planning we always enjoy applying our experience to new clients looking to grow their customer base and better promote their products and services.

Since the start of 2021 a diverse range of new clients through our virtual front door demonstrates that there really are no boundaries to the type of business we can benefit. In brief summary these so far include:

SHC Consultancy:

A Brisbane based consultancy bringing high-level tourism and leisure industry experience to businesses of all sizes, improving systems and processes to increase operational effectiveness, turnover and profitability. As a new start-up we have been involved in creating their business identity and core marketing materials, to help get them noticed for all of the right reasons, in what is often the most crucial time in the business lifecycle.

Zen Vet Behaviour

Zen Vet are a mobile vet behaviour and dog training business serving Brisbane & Ipswich, who as well as training dogs provide pet check-ups in the comfort of their owners own homes as a far more convenient and stress-free experience. Uniquely they also provide palliative management for elderly pets and approached us to help get more conversions from their website and with SEO services to get more traffic to it.

FixMyHeadache

We were appointed both to create a new business identity and design and build a new user interface for their website, which will be their main touchpoint with clients. FixMyHeadache provides online diagnosis of headaches by users interacting with a chat bot. Users answer a series of questions which navigate a diagnosis path, with the questions and answers having been compiled over many years by headache experts from all over the world. Watch this space.

The Goths

We are currently thoroughly enjoying involvement with this lesser known Brisbane band from the late 80's. The Goths wanted someone to align and organise their various digital media channels for both promotion and music distribution, including their own website, Wikipedia, Spotify, Deezer, YouTube Music, a Wordpress Blog and more.

If you happen to be reading this and are wondering if we can help with your next project, the chances are that we can make a massive difference to your business. Call us for a free preliminary consultation on 07 3300 6308 to find out more.

Yet More Important Logo Design Considerations

Logos are generally regarded as artworks which assign a recognisable identity to a business, make it memorable (hopefully for the right reasons) and potentially communicate ideas which add value to the brand.

When approaching the design of a new logo requiring some sort of symbol, device or pictogram, one of the primary strategic considerations that your designer should be making is whether the symbol or device should be literal or conceptual.

Conceptual versus Literal Design

“It’s just a repetition of the name as a nice graphic. So what!?”

This might sound somewhat psychoanalytical, but often I find my inner monologue rambling to literal logo designs in this way quite a lot. Yeah, it’s a Red Hat. What do they do again? Umm … software. It’s actually a really unstylish red panama hat. Or is it a trilby? What were they thinking when they approved that one?

Perhaps I overthink them a bit too much, but probably not. Because the chances are that your clients will have similar reactions (subconscious or otherwise) about your designs, materials and branding when they are dealing with your business.

In short, a dentist logo doesn’t need to show teeth, a construction firm’s logo doesn’t need to show a building (or a hammer) and a smartphone makers logo doesn’t need to show a smartphone.

It is of course debatable but, to us at Absolute, the primary function of a logo is to say ‘Here we are, remember us.’ Whilst images that are relevant to the business and can perform perfectly well as identifying marks, we find it far more meaningful when a logo design communicates something about ‘who they are’ rather than ‘what they do’.

Humans like to recognise visual patterns and solve puzzles. To most it is far more engaging when the brain is required to make the connection between logo device and business name. We have the innate ability to engage and figure things out, and when we make the association between image and company name, we connect on a deeper level. As well as making the design more memorable, done effectively this can also help to unlock the core qualities of the product or service.

To help illustrate the point, I’ll run with a few examples, the first of which only recently dawned on me.

The straight-up lettering and the cheeky little smile beneath it are fairly apparent. But, notice where the smile leads from and to, and the small arrowhead at one end? Yes that’s right … Amazon, everything you need, from A to Z.

The Baskin and Robbins logo is a great, high profile example too. Tucked away in the playful ‘BR’ initials are the numbers 3 and 1, referencing the 31 flavours that they are famous for selling.

Perhaps less well known, but a useful example, is the Museum of London logo. At first glance it just looks like some overlapping biological shapes surrounding the text. The colours in-fact represent the changing borders of this famous city throughout its history. But enough of the reveals. Check out the FedEx logo, have look Cisco’s emblem and, maybe not overly obvious, but see if you can figure out what Hyundai’s logo symbol means … if anything.

One thing is certain; once you make the connection between conceptual design and message by realising what you are looking at, and what it means, it will commit the name and associated values to memory for a much longer than pretty much any literal logo design combo.

There may be an economic downturn hurtling our way but it hasn’t stopped Brisbane businesses both large and small from choosing to invest in the improvement of their sales and marketing initiatives. In recent weeks Absolute Media has been appointed by three brand new clients to get involved and help them significantly improve the way they promote themselves.

The first of the three, Langford Metal, is a large metal fabrication business originally set-up in Brisbane in 1955. Still family owned and with a huge facility featuring some incredible machinery for punching, shaping and forming virtually anything in metal, they had concluded that an overhaul of their website and marketing materials was due. Following a competitive pitch Absolute were given the go-ahead to write the content, design the user interface and page layouts, then code and test their new website, which has just this week launched – www.langfordmetal.com.au.

We were also recently appointed to handle the SEO account for Renew You Wellness. An established and longstanding beautician business Renew You, like many, has recently been hit where it hurts by the enforced closures related to Covid-19, prompting them to come out fighting. With a host of new keywords to get stuck into covering services such as ‘Massage Toowoomba’ we have been on a steep learning rapidly getting to grips with their bewildering range of acupuncture and pain relief services, and of course the phrases used by their target audiences to find such things. Within our first month we’ve managed to get seven of their target terms featuring on page one of Google.

Our marketing and design consultancy services have also been called on by creative art workshop specialist Nurture The Knack. Offering a diverse range of classes for both children and adults (particularly adults who like wine and painting, yes please) to recognise, enjoy and nurture their creative instincts. We are regularly asked to help small businesses who rely on themselves for many things, but who also recognise that external advice can help them take their plans and ideas much further.

If you could benefit from our design, digital and marketing services, then give us a call. Talk is free (for the first 30 minutes lol) and we welcome every opportunity to discuss your ideas!

Absolute Media is proud to welcome our latest new client, Little Estate Lawyers.

Whilst not exactly a hot-off-the-press news scoop (we were originally approached late in 2018), they are yet another great example of a client who originally approached us for a specific solution, then realised the invaluable benefits our rounded marketing experience in helping to establish their new small business, and are now been able to rely on us for additional marketing services.

Headquartered in Brisbane, Little Estate Lawyers are specialist Wills and Estates Lawyers. They operate across Queensland and New South Wales, focusing on the provision of exceptional, straightforward legal advice and no hidden costs to clients in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Sydney.

With a successful legal career which started in 1997, owner Danielle Little worked for almost a decade for a large multi-national firm in litigation and estate matters before specialising in the area of Succession Law. She recently decided to start her own business and during that time chose Absolute Media ahead of numerous other digital marketing agencies to develop her new website design.

New business start-ups are often cost-conscious exercises and this one was no different. Working to a tight budget and with the brief to extend Little Lawyer’s new business brand into the digital world, both parties agreed that the new website design needed to make a strong impact, to become a point of difference from potential competing business websites.

Using a strong, classic black, white and gold colour scheme and some of the classic typographic qualities of ITC’s Avant Garde Gothic font collection, we developed a strong, single page layout and user interface design with the plan to include subtle animation and movement to the live version.

Absolute also catered to the fact that the site would inevitably extend in scope and content as Little Lawyers growth began to develop.

Danielle’s new logo design process with another agency hadn’t gone quite as smoothly as expected, so additional consultation was requested from us on how to address various issues and to ensure that the Little Lawyers logo and brand was both consistently represented and positively extended, to enhance the existing materials and maximise first impressions.

Just six months in and with their second office already open, Absolute have recently been appointed to also handle their Search Engine Optimisation requirements in Queensland and New South Wales.

As the song goes, ‘From the little things, big things grow’. Little Lawyer’s ability to call upon Absolute Media’s broad range of small business marketing services and experience as they develop a name for themselves is a great example of how important it is to partner with a company who take the time to understand your business, and can help you to take it to the next level at every stage.

Since opening our doors to Brisbane in 2005 we have always had a healthy proportion of clients pointed in our direction.

And we are pleased to welcome two more. The new start-up ‘A Happier Life’ and the longstanding ‘Moorooka Sports & Community Club’ have recently joined Absolute Media’s client roster. Both businesses were referred to us for our hugely competitive and very effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) capabilities.

A Happier Life is a hypnosis service owned and operated by former Australian test cricketer Gary Cosier. By utilising Psychotherapy and Hypnosis clients can benefit from their range of traditional solutions to help them quit smoking and lose weight, through to more forward-thinking areas such as life coaching and peak sports performance.

Mookrooka Sports is a traditional bowling club that has undergone subtle modernisation in recent years. This has seen the extension of the club’s facilities to include a new bistro, and to offer its facilities as venues for weddings, social functions and business. Additionally, to appeal to the very popular demand for barefoot bowls in Brisbane food trucks now regularly rock-up to serve hungry punters and craft beers have been introduced to the bar.

In a separate but very do-able manoeuvre, one of our existing clients recently relocated from Hervey Bay to Toowoomba, and wanted to bring their SEO results with them, which is very do-able. Essentially with a purge and replacement of all keyphrases and location mentions to start with, and underpinned by new fundamentals - Google My Business listing, address citations, and editing of the numerous backlinks that we had built - we have successfully transitioned the content and turned on the lead generation fountain in location for a range of terms which include Headache Toowoomba, amongst other symptoms that are treatable with acupuncture and holistic therapies.

Absolute have been providing SEO services since 2011. The increasing level of competition to get companies listed on page one, and our approach of working smarter rather than harder in order to retain our competitive edge, means that we’ve seen a recent surge for this part of our business marketing offering. Many big SEO businesses seem to bombard their clients with the appliance of science and in-depth analyses of algorithm updates, but it’s not as complicated as they make it out to be, and our results clearly demonstrate that fact.

If you’re interested in getting your website to feature in the page one results for a specific, search term or keyphrase, call us on 07 3300 6308 to find out more.

Website technology advances continuously, but rarely does it force us to upgrade older websites.

Since July last year, web browser software (Chrome, Mozilla, MS Edge +++) started labelling websites using HTTP as ‘not secure’ in the address bar. More info here: https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/milestone-chrome-security-marking-http-not-secure/

Whilst not initially problematic, Google has recently raised the prominence of the warnings. Before loading an HTTP page, it is now also displays a prominent ‘site not safe’ page. The net result is that this is deterring visitors and prospects from viewing HTTP websites, who incorrectly assume that the site contains malicious content, which isn’t necessarily the case.

For clients whose sites are hosted on our web servers, we have purchased SSL certificates for those servers which means that you don’t need to purchase one for your own domain. These alone average between $80-200+.

However, to convert your website to HTTPS and achieve secure SSL encryption (showing a padlock in the address bar), we essentially need to locate and change all coded content links on for menus, images, hyperlinks, stylesheets, script libraries and videos, and setup the necessary page re-directions to make sure that all traffic looking for the old content successfully reaches the correct, secure content.

If you'd like your site upgrading to HTTPS, whether you are an existing client or not, we can help. Please contact us and we'll gladly provide an estimate.

Absolute Media are chuffed to announce our latest new client - the McHardy Group - a team of electricians servicing the Brisbane western suburbs region.

With plenty of years of experience, owners Chris and Brett McHardy both previously worked for a large Brisbane electrical business, opting to go it alone when the parent business was carved-up and sold off.

Like many relatively new businesses they’d got the essentials in place – a logo and a basic website – and crossed their fingers that they’d achieve a high Google ranking for anyone searching with the keyphrase ‘Electrician The Gap’.

Whilst turnover has been consistent and job opportunities have been coming in for residential, commercial and industrial electrical work, they’ve quickly realised that they’ll need to get their small business marketing to be far more effective in order to grow and evolve their client base into the areas that they really want to focus on and develop into.

Following a competitive pitch against a large Melbourne-based digital agency, Absolute Media have been successfully chosen to provide the McHardy Group with marketing planning, create a new logo design and branding, and to overhaul their website design to be more effective - both as a site attracting demand from the western suburbs, and converting interest into enquiries – and to improve their search engine optimisation (SEO) activities.

It sounds like we nailed it with our straightforward, no BS pitch for their work because Chris went on to explain “We both agreed that your proposals, ideas, and suggested approach to our business were spot on, and wanted to tell you that you’d got the gig during the meeting!”

We are now well underway with the site redesign, which is going to now have a far stronger and clearer customer benefit focus, and therefore relish the opportunity to post future news about our work for them and – most importantly – about the results that we achieve.

The appointment follows a string of month on month wins for us, which includes also the likes of Xennox Diamonds, Forme Fitness, The Tender Lawyer, and photographer James P. O’Hare.

Regular clients will know that professional marketing advice is an inherent part of our service. We use it in almost every meeting and phonecall to better understand what we’re being asked to do, who we’re targeting and what outcome you plan to achieve.

There are of course many specialist marketing businesses around that charge handsomely for the privilege of their advice and know how. Cynical I know, but this is regularly focussed to help spend your marketing dollars on things they make the most money out of.

Postgrad qualified by the Chartered Institute of Marketing and offering marketing management experience at the highest level having previously worked for a US fortune 500 business, Absolute’s marketing know-how means that we produce fantastic results for you, and that you achieve more effective expenditure on the materials and initiatives that you use to promote increased sales:

• Our research can help you to identify opportunities that you didn’t know existed
• Our planning and strategic thinking can give you a very strong competitive edge, finding ways to help you get your message to your desired target audience and make it stand out from the crowd. By making it memorable and prompting them into action (continue)
• Our results will make your business to look strong and be individual in the marketplace, with the added bonus of creating big pride amongst your team.

Like it or not there are lots of pretenders to the throne out there … “Yes we do marketing, would you like some new pens or mousemats?!” There are also many digital savvy businesses that’ll take your money in return for a great social media presence, but what do they achieve? Do they support your business goals, and are they measurable?

One of the most overused quotes about marketing, attributed to the American John Wanamaker, illustrates just how difficult it can be to quantify a response to marketing expenditure. His comment "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half” still rings very true to anyone who doesn’t know what they’re doing with their marketing budget.

The good news is that we do!

Even greater news is that unless we’re specifically commissioned to help a business plan out its marketing, then usually our clients get the benefit of our marketing experience for free.

And with one eye already on 2018, we are now offering FREE one and a half hour marketing consultations to recipients of this email. This includes clients on our emailing list and any of your direct contacts that this emailer is forwarded to. So, if you’re interested drop us a line. If you’re feeling charitable, you like what we do, and you know another business who might benefit from a small business marketing consult, please forward it to them.

Corporate video has long held its position of stature in the library of marketing materials that an established business is expected to have. In recent years video has proven doubly important as both a unique source of moving web content for landing pages and homepages, and as a mechanism that boosts Search Engine Optimisation rankings in the eyes of Google, Bing and Yahoo because it is considered as an indicator of ‘quality content’.

In the past 15 years Absolute Media has been involved in the production of high-end video content for Queensland Health, DIAGEO and the University of Queensland amongst others. However, with an increasing thirst for video content, and the means to film great quality video by anyone with a smartphone, there is now an acceptance that corporate video itself doesn’t need to be as slick, production polished, and interspersed with flash motion graphics as it used to be. Lower quality web video expectations have steadily eroded the demand for slick high-end video. When an estimate lands complete with the cost of directors, cameras, audio, props, pre-production and post-production, motion graphics (and the rest) it’s often initially perceived as overly expensive, especially when a person can record something to their phone, edit it themselves on PC or Mac, then upload it themselves and have it embedded on a website, essentially for a few bucks and a bit of their own time.

That said, budget video doesn’t have to equate to cr*p quality. It’s definitely possible to not use a camera at all, by doing so keep the cost to a minimum, and yet still produce a slick corporate video production. One recent point in case was for our client Forklift Action who were attending a large international exhibition in Germany, and who needed video content to use at the centre of their stand on a large LCD display screen.

With a basic script, some still images and the purchase of a few stock video segments from popular libraries such as iStockphoto.com, we had everything we needed to create the following video.

Also in-terms of additional benefits of having and integrating video to your website, please also consider … Google owns YouTube, so video hosted on YouTube will of course be ranked even more favourably than on other platforms such as Wistia or Vimeo!

If there’s a hole in your website where some custom video content would be a great addition, call us today to discuss what we can do for you.