Absolute recently attended the celebratory launch of the new edition of artist Jan Jorgensen's printed collection of works titled ‘Changing Places, Brisbane’. Following on from the popular first edition published by Macmillan in 2002, the new edition is illustrated with 54 new images of original paintings by Jan Jorgensen, who also wrote the accompanying poems. The new edition was designed and produced by us at Absolute Media.

Jan’s work has become increasingly important to both to art lovers and city historians alike. Her work captures the light, the everyday and the Brisbane that many do not see and this delightful book provides an interesting ramble through some of Brisbane's most historic streets and backyards. It records changes taking place in the city as the picturesque, old domestic architecture gives way to new developments and will doubtless be attractive to those interested in the changing faces of the city and in the familiar urban environment.

Copies are on sale at Mary Ryan’s and other reputable bookstores. And anyone who spots Absolute’s former Paddington studio on in one of the published artworks … is very observant!

Centenary Natural Therapies Clinic (CNTC) is a longstanding provider of naturopathy, remedial massage and acupuncture services based in Brisbane's Western suburbs.

When looking for a business to handle their Search Engine Optimisation business they were referred to us by one of their clients … who is in-fact one of ours too.

When we started to analyse their website, visitor traffic and SERP's it became startlingly apparent that whilst they were achieving great visitor numbers, they in-fact had a massive bounce rate of over 80% (the bounce rate being those visitors who leave a website from the same page they entered, without exploring any further).

From CNTC's perspective, most of the visitors that their search results were attracting were being turned-off by the landing page content. A combination of factors - inappropriate colour use, misleading headlines, unsuitable visual tone, key word discrepancies and content placement - were clearly sounding alarm bells. Much of CNTC's content was actually suitable, but the compounding result of content misplacement, overly-strong sales messages in the wrong parts of the page layout and general 'addition attrition' meant that it was quite misleading and misinformative. Interestingly no one was really at fault for this problem scenario but, over the course of its lifetime, as greater reliance was being heaped on the website as a productive sales tool, the net result became conversely more detrimental to its purpose as more and more content was added. Our client was just so close to the problem that they couldn’t see the page for the pixels!

So before channelling resource into their search engine rankings for keyphrases like 'remedial massage Brisbane' or 'acupuncture Brisbane', we were clear that this problem needed to be addressed first and recommended giving their website a makeover to make it more appealing to their respective target audiences.

As you'll see if you follow either of the above links, whilst still containing much of the original content the website design is now perfectly apt. Following some careful re-organising, toning down and repackaging of information, the site is also far more communicative, with a hierarchy of prioritised information and with clearly navigable paths to the most in demand information. Most importantly the website meets their client expectation of what a service provider of natural therapies should look like, so on finding the site visitors are now exploring an average of four pages per visit.

We are now focussed on CNTC's SEO keywords and with a number of them now listing on Google page one, we are very proud to report that in January this year, CNTC's bounce rate was less than 24% … which is a significant improvement.

For anyone that is considering re-branding to improve their business efforts, but who doesn’t want to blow the budget in one go … take note.

Some 18 months ago we embarked upon a process to overhaul the marketing materials for Brisbane homecare and aged care services provider, Jubilee Community Care (JCC). A Government funded organisation providing aged care services Brisbane based JCC assist elderly people who want to continue living at home, but who require assistance with day-to-day tasks that have become too difficult to do on their own, such as cooking, shopping or gardening.

With a target audience predominantly consisting of 50 somethings who are looking to third party help for their ageing relatives or friends, as an alternative to going into a care home, Jubilee’s materials had been treated as something of an afterthought and were not communicating the organisation’s experience and the benefits of their service. Instead of portraying the many positive aspects of the elderly people being able to stay at home, they had become a bit gloomy.

Following a strategic review and planning session, we started with the public front end of their business; their website design. We used this project to establish a refreshed design, palette and imagery with an approach focussed upon emphasising the many strong positives that the organisation has to offer, using imagery specifically showing their clients enjoying their diverse interactions with JCC’s support care workers, in scenarios typical of the help often required.

Specifically we used the opportunity to engender some pride within the organisation as well as beyond it, with care workers and support staff also enjoying the fact that they were bringing comfort, support and strong companionship to clients.

With the benefit of seeing the benefits of the refreshed website, JCC has since tasked Absolute with the job of bringing its other core materials in line with the new branding which has seen us tackle print, digital and signage. Of course the net result is that they have steadily refreshed their branding and marketing communications materials without blowing the budget.

If you’d like to discuss your organisations branding, contact us for more details about how we can make it work in your favour.

Absolute Media is a full service advertising, graphic design and multimedia studio based in Brisbane. We combine creative ideas with leading–edge technology to give our clients maximum advantage.

Now 11 years young, we have worked with many A–list advertising brands including Ford, Diageo, Dubai Tourism and Hilton Hotels. Absolute's strong customer service and attention to detail help to maintain a diverse portfolio of customers, and win awards.

Our innovative solutions combine traditional & digital media to produce advertising, marketing, multimedia, web site design, branding, online marketing & corporate video, and our approach is simply Explore : Create : Engage