An example of great web design & branding

I want to send out a huge kudos to whomever had the inspiration, thought leadership, and/or final decision in creating the theme (look and feel) and logo for Search Engine Land.

This site’s article pages are a great example of web design. The logo is prominently located in the upper left corner. It’s colors are progressive and memorable. The menu navigation is conveniently at the top of the page. The main header’s font is at a balanced size and weight, and in a distinctive blue hue. The page itself is a large, centered, white column containing all of it’s information on a blue striped background. What I take away from this design helps me associate Search Engine Land’s branding as blue and white with a splash of progressive green.

This branding impression can be very important because there are visitors who browse the internet with multiple windows (or tabs) at open at once. I admit I am one of these types, and I observe others who do the same. When these multiple viewing panes are open and one of them accidentally gets closed, that branding impression can help the visitor remember what was just closed.

Case in point:
Last night, I was shutting down my computer for the night. I had multiple browser windows open with multiple tabs open in each. My browser is set to remember all of the tabs’ URLs of the last instance of the browser window open. I accidentally closed one browser window which had a webpage article I did not finish reading from earlier in the day. I looked in my task bar and realized I still had one more browser instance running.

Okay, quick. Think of which website had that article. I remember seeing white and blue. I believe it was Search Engine Land & the article was a recent post. I navigate to my RSS feeds and see if it was still listed. No it was not. It was obviously not that recent. So I just went to the homepage; maybe it’s listed there. It wasn’t; the morning posts were being outdated by the afternoon posts. Okay — let’s use the site’s search: flying solo SEO. Found it!

Now I could have used my browser’s web history tools to find it, but I didn’t want to launch those. I was leaving for the night. I want that immediate satisfaction, like many web users. It was because of the great aesthetic design of Search Engine Land & branding identity I was able retrace my steps in less than a few clicks.

Excellent work Search Engine Land!