Advice from a top website developer on how he helps his clients stake a claim in their industry.
A brand is a symbol for your business. This symbol is used to represent characteristics, experiences and knowledge of a business into a message or idea. Brand builders use logos, phrases, sounds and imagery that are related too and consistent with the message a business wants to portray to its target audience. Branding is important as it helps to build trust, which attracts customers, and maintain them for the long term.
Branding harnesses the power of association and feelings of trust to draw consumers to a certain brand when other similar options exist. If consumers know your brand, they feel comfortable with it and trust their expectations will be met.
Branding takes place through different types of media, including packaging, print media, TV advertising, logo design, point of sale decoration and of course website design. No matter how big or small your enterprise, building a consistent branding message into your strategy will set you apart from the competition.
When branding a website it is important to pay attention to the following areas:
Colour Scheme
The colour scheme you choose for your website will stimulate subconscious associations and emotions. Choosing a colour for helping brand your website is the first step in setting the tone and doing research to colour effects is important.
For example, the colour green has a calming effect and can symbolize nature or health but also money and profits. Red on the other hand carries energy, power, excitement and passion, which helps make it a good choice for products meant to excite.
Maintain a consistent colour scheme throughout your website to harness the full stimulating potential.
Personality & Character
Consumers often use brands or products to define their personalities. Ensure your brand embodies a character your target audience can identify with. Attributing human qualities and characteristics to animals or objects is known as anthropomorphism. Many times, anthropomorphic elements are used to convey brand character.
An example of this is the M&M chocolate brand, turning their chocolates into living characters.
Creating Emotion
Consider what feelings or possible experiences you want associated with your brand when people view your website. Site aesthetics is about implying emotions through design, not the latest trends. Use vibrant design to capture excitement and creativity, or something more subdued for a more serious feel.
Be Consistent
Remain consistent to design choices you made at the beginning of your designs to project a uniform message through your entire website. This will allow consumers to know your brands look and also speed up future website additions through reuse of style sheets and images. Your website will also load more efficiently. This applies to colour scheme, logos, images, text and layout.
Logo, Menu, Content Positioning
Where you place information on your website is important to catch the eye of visitors and to maintain a flow throughout your design. An example is placing your logo always in the upper left page area, where users are accustomed to looking for it.
Display Your Value Proposition
Having a brand statement prominently displayed and easily visible will help visitors orient themselves on your website. Briefly explain your brand and its benefits to let visitors know what you’re about and why they should care.
Website Language
Use the tone in which your content is presented to reinforce the character and personality of your brand. The old saying “It’s not about what you say, but how you say it” rings true in this instance. Ensure that your character is in line with your target audience.
Originality
Perhaps the most important component of any branding strategy is to be original. This will have your brand image remembered by your visitors and provide differentiation from your competition. Be unique to be memorable.
No matter the size of your business, building a strong, memorable brand is important to differentiate from the competition and build a relationship with your target market. Your website is the perfect platform to promote your brand and this makes it the best place to develop your businesses brand. Website branding should not be ignored and its various techniques can effectively add value to your business.
