I have heard from many sources that there are some changes being planned from HSUK which may alter the branding for the corporate image and people are expressing concern about their websites. HSUK will expect websites to follow suit in a period yet to be defined. This may cover logos, colours, fonts, images as they re-launch their new image.
If you are wondering if you need a new website, you probably don’t. Depending on how Home-Start launch this, and the extent of the support they provide to those people that already have websites online, I would anticipate that they will release a branding guideline which will contain the relevant information.
Once I see one of these I will put some more detail on this site about the action I recommend you take to bring your site in alignment with the new guidelines and how I can help.
Websites, particularly the more recent Divi based sites use a lot of elements within them which can globally change colours, fonts, header images and layouts relatively easily. The ones I have created over the past two years are built that way, so it is easy for example to change the iconography of the brand, colours tag lines on all pages in a few minutes.
Changing images, will take a little longer. Bottom line is don’t panic. I am panicking for everyone 😉 so let’s not waste any more effort here than we need to.
I anticipate that it should be possible to change many elements of your current site to meet new branding guidelines relatively easily. There may however be a line we need to draw if the changes are too prescriptive. So I will seek a compromise that pays due respect to HSUK, and does not create a hole in your budget; which is better applied to the services you provide to your clients. Any branding change is a licence to spend money with no appreciable benefit to your bottom line in the short term. The need for a branding change is most likely at the UK level rather than the local offices. But you will all be expected to fall in line.
As I have supported at various times over 60 Home-Start organisations and some of you are on your third generation website, I do understand something about the organisation. If you would like to recommend that HSUK talks to me, I would be more than happy to do so. None of the approaches I have made in the past have yielded anything of value so far. So I suspect that they may be more inclined to listen to the Home-Start offices I support, in the knowledge that I for one am not in this for the money; just to help charitable institutions.
The last approach I made to HSUK which was to recommend a PAYG website at £10 per month for three years (dropping to £5/ month on the 37th month), no minimum contract, all at my risk to help people with no website to get started was dismissed by them in case we may be competing. So as far as I know it was never advertised.
There is so much we could achieve together. An opportunity lost regrettably so far.