Website branding is an essential part of any digital marketing endeavors, since it determines how visitors perceive your business online. There are many advantages to your website having its own brand identity, including immediately communicating professionalism and trustworthiness at the first point of contact, ensuring a cohesive look and feel across pages, and setting your website apart from the competition. Of course, all these elements and more go a long way towards reaching a broader audience and improving user engagement, which go hand in hand with business success.
Understanding your Brand
There are several steps to developing website branding. First and foremost, you need to determine your brand’s mission, vision, and core values. These elements are crucial to any form of brand identity because they form the identity at its most basic level. Your brand’s mission refers to your brand’s definition of its own purpose, objectives, and how it plans to serve its audience, your brand’s vision refers to your company’s idea of its future, and your brand’s core values refer to the beliefs that the company stands for. Defining these aspects of your brand identity is an important task that lends direction to your website branding efforts. This way, you can make the right decisions for your brand by aligning them with the mission, vision, and core values you’ve defined.
Developing a Brand Style Guide
Once you’ve determined your brand’s mission, vision, and core values, develop a brand style guide. The first step in doing this is to come up with a logo for the brand, and use it consistently across all platforms. Logos provide your main way of leveraging the advantages mentioned above, ensuring a cohesive look across pages and platforms, as well as setting your sites apart from the competition. You should come up with a few slightly different variations for different usage scenarios. For example, you can use a simplified version of the main logo that maintains key brand elements in places where the main logo doesn’t fit. Alternatively, you can use just the brand’s icon or symbol for app icons or social media profiles.
When creating a logo for website branding, color choice is essential. Make sure to choose primary, secondary, and contextual colors that complement each other in a visually pleasing manner. Once you’ve chosen these colors, ensure their consistency across all web pages and platforms. Don’t forget about accessibility, either. Make considerations for individuals who may be colorblind by using high contrast, colorblind friendly color combinations. You can take this a step further by testing for accessibility with colorblind users.
After determining a color scheme for the logo, the next step in developing a brand style guide is maintaining consistent typography. This is another way of leveraging the advantages mentioned above, setting your brand apart from the competition as well as ensuring a consistent look and feel across web pages. When creating the typography for a brand style guide, make sure to define rules for fonts, sizes, and hierarchy. From there, make sure to keep these rules consistent. Use the same fonts for the same types of content, and so on.
Define Your Brand Voice and Tone
With a brand style guide developed, it’s time to define the voice and tone of your brand. This refers to the tone in which your brand communicates with its audience. For example, your brand voice and tone could be absurd and weird, humorous, or strong and aggressive. There are all kinds of brand voices and tones you can choose from, but just like the logo design, whichever one you choose must remain consistent across pages and platforms. For example, if your chosen tone is casual, humorous and engaging, make sure things like social media posts, blogs, web pages, ad campaigns, and customer support communications align with that voice.
Visual and Imagery Guidelines
Visual and imagery guidelines provide another important part of developing a brand style guide. This way, you make sure to maintain cohesive visual representations across all platforms. Define image and icon types to be used across all platforms that align with your brand’s personality and messaging. Keep these elements consistent, just like the rest of the brand style guide. Consistency is the name of the game. You should also keep your image resolutions consistent and optimized for both web and print use, so you can maintain quality and clarity across mediums.
User Interface (UI) Elements
The umbrella of website branding also includes UI (user interface) elements. Make sure to design UI elements like buttons, forms, and navigation that align with the already determined brand color palette and voice. This maintains visual consistency in the user interface design. For instance, if your brand’s voice is minimalist, be sure to include that in the user interface design. Things like buttons and forms should reflect that.
Consistency Across All Channels
As mentioned above, consistency is the name of the game when creating a brand identity. Maintaining vocal and visual consistency across websites, social media, and even offline materials fosters that sense of professionalism and trustworthiness for your business or organization. In addition, make sure all team members and partners adhere to the brand to maintain consistency. One easy way to do this is to write down the brand style guide, and distribute it to employees, team members, and partners. This way, they can refer to it as needed.
The Importance of Website Branding
At this point, the importance of a strong, consistent brand should be apparent. A well-defined brand identity goes a long way in demonstrating professionalism and trustworthiness to a potential audience via a consistent look and feel across pages, while setting your business apart from its competitors. By following these guidelines, you can develop your own brand style guide to take your business’s online presence to the next level.
