Our company needs a brand
There is no doubt that at some time you have heard someone talking about their company’s brand or the lacking of their company brand. Unfortunately, most people think their company brand is comprised of their logo and the colors they use in their marketing materials.
Logo, colors and fonts do play a part in the company’s brand, but the true brand of a company goes to the root of the company’s values. It is best to uncover these values and do the hard work of finding out what makes your company unique before selecting colors and attempting to create a logo. The reason for this is simple. You will have those colors and logo for years to come…hopefully. Re-branding is costly. If you are in business for say three years and you decide at the end of those three years that your logo or your colors really don’t seem adequate or do not represent your company like you want them too, then you are in for a re-branding of your company.
Re-branding costs time, money and customer confusion
Re-design the logo, redo the website, redo every other piece of marketing material you have like invoices, estimates, etc. and then after you have spent thousands of dollars on those updates and changes, you will need to re-brand your company in your clients minds. Not a huge task if you are a small service based company and you actually know most of your important clients, but if you are medium to large company then your customers are going to feel strange when they see your new logo and colors. They’ll feel like they should know your company but to them it will feel like they are doing business with a stranger – definitely not what you want.
Do the hard work first…not later
Spend the extended time and money at the beginning when you start your business. Determine what core values your business will stand for and how you want your business to be perceived by your clients and also what it is that will separate you from your competition (you’ll need this ability to set yourself apart). When you truly understand these things then you will be in a much better spot to help your designer or branding professional create a brand for your company. If you simply want to hire a logo designer so you can have a logo and company colors so you can say your company has a brand – then I’d have to say “good luck”. That logo and those company colors that are simply chosen without much thought other than it looks good or feels right won’t stand the test of time.
The bottom line
Your logo and company colors are not brand. They are only a part of your brand and should be a reflection of the core values of your company.
PHP 5.6 runs on about 60% of the worlds web servers and support is ending on December 31, 2018 (End Of Life). That means new PHP 5 vulnerabilities may not be patched and could possibly leave hundreds of thousands of websites vulnerable. Time will tell what kind of wide reach this issue will have regarding security and website compromises. You can see these web server statistics on w3techs.com <https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/5/all>.
The first thing you should do is contact your IT person or your website hosting company and verify what version of PHP your web server is running. If you are still running PHP 5 of any version then you need to upgrade to PHP 7.1.
Upgrading is not so simple sometimes
Upgrading your web server language can be a little tricky. Your upgrade issues won’t usually arise from upgrading PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.1. The problems normally arise when you start determining if your WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or other PHP based CMS (content management system) plugins will still function after the upgrade.
You may already have the latest version of WordPress installed and this should work fine with PHP 7.1 for the most part. However, you will need to test and verify. Major upgrades like this are always a pain because of the testing that needs to happen. Even after extensive testing, things can be missed. Be prepared to react to those additional details as quickly as possible after upgrading. Meaning, don’t upgrade and expect everything to be perfectly smooth. Sometimes you get lucky and there are no issues and sometimes your luck is not so good.
On a good note, this DOES NOT mean that every website running PHP 5.6 will become vulnerable January 1, 2019 – Happy New Year – LOL. What it does mean is that if a new vulnerability is found in PHP, your old version of PHP may not get the security fix and could be open to attacks.
It’s not too late. Take action. Contact your IT or Web Developer and have them verify you are safe.