Intuitive Designs - Custom Web Design & Illustration Services

We are excited to announce the site redesign for IttyBiz.com.

Naomi Dunford, whom I affectionately like to refer to as my tocaya, approached us because she felt that the original IttyBiz site was no longer representing her thriving business. IttyBiz has grown exponentially since starting and she wanted to focus more on her marketing and small business help products and courses and not mainly on her blog like before, while still keeping the blog visible. She had also made additions to the site as it grew and needed it all to be tied together cohesively again.

IttyBiz has a large following. That makes this type of project challenging because you want the website design to reflect growth and maturity, but also don’t want to alienate existing loyal customers and readers. I have been religiously reading Naomi’s blog since shortly after she started IttyBiz, so I was very familiar with her services and branding. As a reader myself, I put myself directly in the shoes of her target customer and thought about what I would want.

But, the main challenge with her site redesign was finding a way to portray her business biggified-like while still letting her well-known personality shine through and keeping her existing branding mainly intact.

So, we decided (us together with Naomi) to keep her red color and make the rest of the site very clean and high contrast, but add a little punch to emphasize particular areas that we wanted to call attention to. Naomi is very well-known for her candor and straightforward no-nonsense advice, so we decided to play on that. For example, her tagline “Marketing for businesses without marketing departments” is excellent. It’s very straightforward and descriptive, so we made that front and center. When you first visit the site, you don’t have to wonder what it’s all about.

We also decided to do a very clean magazine type layout for the home page so that you can get a quick general idea of IttyBiz’s offerings if you’re a new visitor. And if you’re an existing loyal visitor, you should also have an easy time finding the latest blog posts and news.

Koldo did the custom illustrations for the site shop banners and items that you see on the home page middle column and store page. And, when it was complete, the design itself was coded by us as a Wordpress theme into the existing site and other small additions were made like threaded comments and related posts. Without getting into too many technicalities, I’ll only mention that we made the code clean and light for fast-loading and SEO purposes.

As far as the general process went, working with Naomi was great. She knew just what problems she needed help with, presented them to us, and then let us help come up ideas on how to resolve them. She said to me during our initial discussion in a light-hearted manner, “Fix my life.” to which I replied, “We can’t fix your life, but maybe we can do something with your site.”.

I hope you all enjoy the new look! Please feel free to leave your comments below.