To set the mood of an evening, you need the right music. I’ve a friend who enjoys playing Noel Coward on a Saturday night as he mixes cocktails. When he puts that tinkly piano accompanied by snappy wit on, everything just feels buzzy, chic – as though Princess Margaret is about to arrive amid a summer dusk.

The choice for some is jazz – others opera, I always admire a quirky choice I’m unfamiliar with. It’s intriguing how we discover particular music that’s from a bygone era, from amazing singers, long passed away. ‘Music never dies’ – these extraordinary voices, once recorded, are never lost.

We’ve just completed a piece of work which I like to think contributes to the recognition of just such an artist – a charitable foundation web design project for classic English opera singer Jennifer Vyvyan.

As businesses evaluate the future, every company is assessing the landscape and making tough choices. For some, this will mean a fundamental re-think, often involving a merger or buy-out with former competitors. Restructuring is disorienting but requires fresh thinking, to really get creative – on every front.

With a blending of assets, perhaps following a capital raise and a reboot of how a company works, we’ve often helped with parallel visual changes in terms of how it looks, too. When two companies merge, the new blend of personalities means considering if that requires new branding. Often at speed.

So, now’s the time to start planning. Post-merger rebranding requires ingenuity, using budget carefully to ensure maximum impact.

One of the unsettling aspects to working over the past months is that while some businesses flatline, others work flat out. For those working of us in a business consultancy, whether in the financial or marketing sector, there’s a further source of uncertainty – these fluctuations are client-led. With that challenge acknowledged, I believe if you’ve proved there’s a gap in the market for what you’re doing and it’s being managed and serviced well, it will grow.

But how best to promote and capitalise on hard-won success?

Put simply, we’re in the midst of a digital business revolution. If you haven’t paid attention to your online offering, now is the moment to redesign a consultancy website. No question, it’s the best way of exposing growing parts of your business to the marketplace and to build momentum.

In this article I talk about ways to achieve that pace of work, and how we worked with a client of ours to rise to these challenges.

One of the most satisfying professional projects is the realisation of a project that has been a long time coming. We’ve just completed one of these, a new web design for holiday company The Alpine Generation.

We talked to Graham and Kelly, who run the business, about a total overhaul for the first time back in 2017. The idea had been to take the design and apply it to the web at that point, but in the event, that ended up not being a priority. However we finally got our chance to complete the project a few weeks ago. Deep in lockdown, I had a call with the team who had decided now was the moment to focus on the future.

A few weeks later, guess what: it’s already arrived.

There’s that expression I keep hearing these days, ‘don’t let perfect be the enemy of good’. And there’s something to it. In our studio we strive for a superb, creative outcome on every piece of work.

But sometimes inevitably constraints mean that the ideal project they wanted is impossible because… maybe the photos aren’t ready (or these days, the shoot is delayed). Perhaps budget is tight. Or a major new product doesn’t launch for a few months, but that can’t delay the finished website.

Whatever the reason, I try to find the positive in the situation. We try and encourage our clients to press ahead with what they have now, then build on that work. It’s an approach I call ‘incremental web design’: where money isn’t wasted, but seen as an initial investment built upon over time, defining an easy-does-it approach to a fantastic website.

Over the last decade, the Shine School Media Awards has consistently rewarded the UK’s best school magazines or newspapers. In the seven years I’ve been involved with this annual competition, the team behind the project have always worked on incrementally improving every aspect of it, adapting with the times. For instance, latterly we’ve introduced a podcast category and have begun accepting digital publications and highly sophisticated websites.

That said, the familiar pattern of the year, leading up to a grand gala ceremony at Stationers’ Hall in the City of London, has never really changed. However, this year, we reinvented it – at a few weeks’ notice. When Stationers Hall closed in April, it was a terrible blow, made even more complicated by schools moving to online learning.

We pondered cancellation. However: it turned out that it was much too early to count out our students, whose enthusiasm spurred us on to be radical and hold this year’s ceremony as an online event.