| this is way better than the current site. in the sense that it actually conveys a brand - whereas the original is far more neutral I've no idea if this was a deliberate choice in the case of the current site - but having neutral visual branding can be a very effective technique for organisations to exploit for a couple of reasons: 1) The visual brand isn't the only factor that effects conversion. When you're exploring your product/market fit it can be much more cost effective to work with a neutral visual brand and tweak your other positioning mechanisms, rather than create multiple visual brands that target different markets. 2) It's relatively easy to evolve a neutral visual brand into something more targeted. It's much harder to go the other way. Basically - if you're going to go strong in one direction you need to be pretty sure that it's the right direction. To pick one real world example. I did some usability testing work on a franchise of bed'n'breakfast style "holiday" hotels. We were looking at a couple of design alternatives. One of which was very plain and "vanilla". The other was considerably more "polished", included some nice professional photography, tours, etc. The "polished" design performed _far_ worse. It put-off some of the low-end users (by looking "polished" it no longer looked "cheap") while not really increasing conversions in the high-end group. In contrast the "plain" brand worked well across everybody - by neither looking "cheap" or "expensive". Before we did the testing many folk commented that the polished design was "nicer" and was "more designed". It wasn't. It was a different design. A neutral visual brand is still branding. |