Branding your calculator
Theme dresses the calculator your customers see, the emails they get and the quote PDFs you send. The dashboard stays Solar Desk, because the dashboard is not something a customer ever looks at.
Like Pricing, this page is admin only. A rep sees it with the inputs disabled.
- The preview panel, updating live as you type. It shows the header, the tagline, the four figures and the button in whatever palette you have chosen.
- Eleven colours, each a picker and a hex box. Button and highlight is the one people change first.
- The readability panel, which grades six text-and-background pairs and can stop you saving.
- Where new enquiries go. At least one address is required, and it is the only route by which you find out an enquiry has arrived.
Colours
Section titled “Colours”Eleven, each with a picker and a hex box. They come in pairs, because almost every one is a foreground sitting on a background:
- Page background and Card background, plus a Subtle fill for the quieter panels.
- Body text and Secondary text, on those backgrounds.
- Rules and borders.
- Header bar and Text on the header.
- Button and highlight, and Text on a button.
- Link text, which carries the only hint on the block: it is usually a darker version of your highlight colour, so that it reads as text.
That hint is the whole trick. A highlight colour is chosen to be seen from across a room, and a bright amber or a mid green makes a wonderful button and a terrible sentence.
The readability check, and why Save can refuse
Section titled “The readability check, and why Save can refuse”This is the most opinionated screen in Solar Desk, so it is worth explaining rather than only describing.
Six pairs are checked, each against a minimum of 4.5:1, and each is named in plain English rather than in colour theory:
| Pair | What it is |
|---|---|
| Body text on the page | Most of the words on the calculator |
| Body text on a card | The same words on a white panel |
| Secondary text on the page | Hints, captions, the small print under a field |
| Link and accent text | Your link colour, against the page |
| Navigation text on the rail | Your header text, against your header bar |
| Text on an accent button | The label on your main button |
- The header counts the problems: "Readability, all pass" when the palette is clean.
- Each row gives the measured ratio, so you can see how much headroom you have rather than only whether you scraped through.
Fail one, and three things happen at once. The header changes to count the problems, the failing row turns red and says what it needs, and Save is disabled with “Fix 1 readability problem first.” beside the button.
- Link text changed to a pale yellow. On screen it looks like a colour choice, not a mistake.
- 1.31:1 against a minimum of 4.5. Text at that ratio is effectively invisible to a lot of people, and perfectly legible to whoever picked it.
- Save is disabled, not warned. The message beside it counts the problems.
Why a white-label tool refuses
Section titled “Why a white-label tool refuses”The page that would become unreadable is not ours. It has your name on it, your colours, your phone number, and a customer who cannot read the saving figure does not blame Solar Desk.
The harder reason is that this is not a mistake you catch by eye. A contrast failure looks perfectly fine to the person who chose the colours, on the monitor they chose them on, in the room they were sitting in. The design this product replaced shipped a muted grey at 4.43:1, a hair under the line, and nobody noticed for months. A warning would have been scrolled past. A gate is not.
Fixing one
Section titled “Fixing one”It is almost always the link colour or the text on your accent button.
- Link and accent text failing? You have probably used your highlight colour as your link colour. Darken it until it passes; the two are separate fields precisely so that they can differ.
- Text on an accent button failing? Swap between a near-black and a near-white label. One of the two will pass against almost any button colour.
- Secondary text failing? Your secondary grey is too light. This is the one that slips through most often, because it looks tasteful.
Your logo
Section titled “Your logo”At the top of the Theme page, above the colours. Choose a file and it goes up on its own, without waiting for Save theme, and the preview beside it then shows what a customer would be served. Replace logo swaps it, Remove takes it away again, and with no logo your customers see your company name set in your header colours, which is a plainer page rather than a broken one.
Only an admin can set it, like everything else on this page.
PNG, WebP or JPEG, up to 1 MB. A header logo is usually a few tens of
kilobytes, so a megabyte is generous rather than tight. The file is checked by
its actual contents rather than its name, so renaming something to .png will
not get it past.
SVG is refused, and this is not an oversight. An SVG can carry scripts, and this file is served on a page your own customers use, so accepting one would let a bad file run code in their browser under your name. Export your logo to PNG, on a transparent background if you have one, at roughly twice the height it needs to be so it stays sharp on a phone.
A wide logo is scaled down to the height of the header, so a long horizontal lockup reads better there than a tall stacked one.
Wording
Section titled “Wording”- Tagline. Sits under your name at the top of the calculator. Meridian’s reads “Cleaner energy, clearer numbers”.
- Step 1 label through Step 6 label. Rename the six steps of the calculator in your own words. The defaults are Your property, Your roof, Your energy use, Your system, Your estimate and Register your interest, and each box shows its default as a placeholder, so leaving one blank keeps the default rather than producing an unnamed step.
Behaviour
Section titled “Behaviour”Four settings, and they matter more than the colours do.
Callback window (hours). Between 1 and 336, and 48 by default. This number is promised on the confirmation screen and repeated in the email, in your name. Promising a window you do not hit is worse than promising a longer one.
Where new enquiries go. One address per line, and at least one is required. This is the only way you find out an enquiry has arrived, and the notification rule behind it surprises people: Solar Desk sends one email per unread run. Four customer messages in a row produce one email, and the counter only resets when somebody reads. There is no reminder and no scheduler, so a recipient who never opens their email gets exactly one, ever. Put an address here that a person actually watches, and put in more than one if that person takes holidays. See emails.
How long a quote stays valid. In days, 1 to 365, and 30 by default. After that a customer can still read the quote but cannot accept it. Panel prices move, and a quote with no expiry is a price you are still bound to a year later.
Show finance options. Turn it off if you are not authorised to offer credit. While it is on, a customer sees an instalment plan and a representative example on step 5, and that example cannot be switched off, because quoting an APR and a monthly payment is a regulated financial promotion.
Ask for details before showing the estimate. Off by default, and it swaps the last two steps of the calculator round. Ticked, your customer fills in the contact form at step 5 and sees the four figures at step 6, so you have their name and email before they have a number. Unticked, they get the estimate at step 5 and the form at step 6.
Either way the enquiry reaches your pipeline the moment they send the form, with the same estimate attached, and the first four steps are identical. The step labels you set above follow the step rather than the position, so “Your estimate” stays the estimate’s heading wherever it falls.
The preview panel
Section titled “The preview panel”The right-hand side is a live mini calculator in your palette: your name, your tagline, the four figures and your main button, updating as you type. Underneath it sits your calculator’s address, after “Preview at” while you are pending and “Live at” once you are live.
It is the fastest way to judge colours, and it is not the calculator. It has no steps, no map, no finance and no forms. For that, use the real preview.
Saving
Section titled “Saving”Save theme confirms with “Saved. Your calculator is using these now.” Unlike pricing, this takes effect immediately: the next page a customer loads is in the new colours and the new wording.
Setting at least one address under “Where new enquiries go” clears the third of the three go-live blockers.