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Here are our top ten basic tips for making your website look great:   1. Clean space & no busy backgrounds. Space is really important in the layout of a website as it gives the eye room to breathe. If you use a busy background, or cram loads of information on a page, the important information will get lost and your user won't want to take the time to find what they need. 2. Use a web friendly font or use Google's excellent font library and code You may have a favourite font, but if it isn't web friendly, or if you haven't used Google's clever font system, the page you're designing may not look how you intended on your reader's screen. If you are really deseperate to use a font that is not available as either, it will need to be done as images. However, this will make it...

  Wishing you all a very merry Christmas, and a happy and successful 2015 We will be closed from end of the day 23rd till 9am 5th January Sam and the team at Hot Sand Design

It's that time of year again and we are delighted once more to be supporting the Dumbfest music and comedy festival in Bordon, Hampshire. The festival, raising money for The Teenage Cancer Trust, is on Satuday the 3rd May and starts at 11am at the Phoenix Theatre and Arts Centre . With 12 hours of music from a wide variety of acts (including myself with Funkee Clawed!) and comedians including Phil Kay, it will be a great day out for a fantastic cause.  

This week we have launched a new website for breathe cashflow - a new company offering invoice finance solutions. You can visit the site at www.breathecashflow.co.uk . Owner Ian is already getting loads of great feedback and we wish him lots of success!

We are delighted that the launch of the latest Phoenix Theatre programme, designed by us here at Hot Sand, has hit the local headlines! We wish them a very successful season!  

A logo, whether good or bad, represents your company on many levels. For a start, without a logo it would be impossible for your customers to identify you from anyone else. Everyone has strong opinions regarding their favourite brand. These opinions are more often than not emotional than rational. With some brands (for example Nike and Coca-Cola) customers form an emotional attachment, often to the point that they disregard better products for the ones with higher visibility and brand recognition. Some brands even become synonymous with the product they represent and the consumer starts recognising the product by its brand name - for example Hoover or Biro. It is therefore of the utmost importance that every company, especially small businesses, have a sound brand strategy and a strong brand identity with a unique identifiable logo. Having a great logo helps small business in lots of ways. A few of the...

You could be forgiven for thinking that high quality design would only be of benefit to bigger companies, the Coca Cola's and Nike's of this world, but you would be wrong. Having a consistent and professional identity is just as important for small and medium size businesses. A good logo is crucial for getting the right message across to your customers and competitors, and good general design is equally important.  The subject of design is huge, and we only have the space to cover a small bit of it here, but for all businesses, no matter what size, the key is consistency. Consistency means that you become recognisable as a company before you have even delivered your message.  Recognition in the market place is of vital importance to your company's success. The old adage goes, "people buy from people", and this is true whether you are dealing with companies or...