Odvantage Ltd

I was introduced to Barry O’Driscoll, the owner of Odvantage, by my old friend and colleague, Steve Ellis. Barry is a Consultant, like Steve and when he spoke to Steve about Website Design and Branding, we had just put together a package for his company, Consaelting Ltd. Barry got in touch and we hit it off right away – despite him being a Gloucester fan and me down here in Devon with my Exeter Chiefs!

Barry had quite a complex existing set up, with his domain name sitting within WordPress.com which led to some interesting DNS investigations, but we soon found where everything was and got on with the design. Barry had been meaning to do this for some time and had a lot of fantastic content set aside, ready to go. All that being good, as always I started with the Branding as it always gives me the opportunity to have an extra opinion and creative set of eyes via my good friend, Guy Rayment.

Guy got together with Barry to discuss the brand and Barry had a pretty clear idea in his head of what he wanted, however there was a lot of fine tuning and we created several light and dark versions. The ‘eye’ is a great visual and it provided the logo, some interesting background imagery and we even plucked the website accent colour from it. It’s important to get this bit of the process right as it sets out the foundations for the website build.

There is a lot of content on the site and the six Case Studies are quite ‘information intensive’ so the layout for these was important and the addition of great imagery from Barry also helped break things up. Once Guy had nailed the branding, I built the back end of the website and built the pages. I then used Guy to set up the palette and fonts, to make sure the look and feel were consistent with the branding. The more Guy and I work together, the more we work to our strengths and bring our own energy to the project. I love the mono imagery, but particularly when you have the shift to colour during mouseover movements – it brings a level of interactivity and interest to the content.

Barry wanted the site to be Professional, Clean and Informative and I think we’ve pulled that off. The site is well laid out to allow natural growth and additional Case Studies or News Stories. This will ensure it stays relevant in Search results.