How to Brand Your Business Website
Every brand had an identity built from the product, audience, and reputation that naturally surround your business. Maybe you're known as a family brand, or a trendy digital brand, or a smart-integrated brand, or a reliable local brand. These identifiers are important, and form your overall brand identity. However, not every business understands how to translate their brand identity into a website that maintains the same reputable customer experience.
Your website design should reflect your company completely, both the brand and the full range of services. To do this, you'll need to work closely with your web designers to capture the brand personality and to build every feature needed for online clientele. In this article, we will highlight the essential elements of turning your brand into a complete, actionable website design.
Know Your Brand
Start with the identity of your business brand. This goes beyond your logo and brand colours. Brand identity includes your company values, the employee culture, and the personality of the company as a whole.
Is your brand playful or solemn?
Do you speak in a friendly, academic, or authoritative tone?
Are you a thought-leader or a supporter of the tried-and-true?
Are you one with your audience or are you set apart?
These answers can help you find the real identity of your brand and convey that to your designers. Web designers need to know how to unify the elements. Knowing your brand's personality can help the design convey that to future customers. This will draw in customers who enjoy or trust your brand identity and would naturally favour your website over those of other brands.
Your Core Message
Every company has a central message, one value that rises above all others. Some, for example, vow to save time prioritise speedy service. Some value customer satisfaction and pour their efforts into individual success stories. Some prioritise community service and focus on goals that will make a tangible difference.
What is your company's central message? You might have a company motto from the founder, but your message might equally come from an office joke that has become your rally-cry.
Define the one thing your brand cares about above all else.
Choose Your Visual Style
Now it's time to start talking graphics. Once your design team understands the company as a brand, you can refine your visual appearance. If you don't have company colours, choose them with the help of your designers. If you do, weave them aesthetically throughout the design of the website. With the right theme and colour application, you can make your company's colour palette as quickly recognised as the global giant brands.
From there, choose an art style. Some brands benefit from calligraphy styles, some from childish bubble fonts and margin cartoons. Your brand personality will define the best way to stylise (and unify the style of) your company website.
The Faces of the Brand
Pick a few members of your team, or the entire team, to be the faces of the brand. Customers like to see team-members in the About section, especially group photos and inspiring biographies.
Highlight your founder or create a warm section crediting each member of your team to add that human element. Now is a good time to take a team photo and matching portraits. To get your blurb content, we recommend asking each team member to write a few facts about themselves and also a few positive comments about each colleague. This can help give a more glowing and complete view of each team member.
Making the Customer Experience Matter
In the post-covid era of practical containment, online services are just as important as onsite services. To fully serve customers remotely, your website will need to offer all or most of the services you once provided in-person. There are several different ways to do this. Live chat and video meetings are a great way to supplement live assistance. Make sure your website is prepared to shepherd customers toward these live services, if needed.
Your website can also be expanded to include tools and whole module sections for any online services you may wish to provide. Financial estimator tools, for example, are a great onboarding and lead-generating funnel while also providing useful information to new customers. If you believe in community, host a forum on your website. If your business delivers, include a live order-tracking portal.
Any website can be expanded to include a near-infinite number of features. Ensure your business services are reflected fully through your website design.
Brand Identity and Website Images
Images are an essential part of designing any website. It's not just whether to have photos or even what to point the camera at. Photography is an art and the images in your website should line up stylistically.
For example, one brand might focus on skyscrapers and abstract technology photos taken at dizzying angles, while another features sunny outdoor shots of animals. A manufacturing brand might feature interesting close-ups of machinery while a 3D design studio might personalise with images of wireframes and programmer graphics.
What will your website feature photos of? Startups often benefit from a behind-the-scenes approach with fun shots of the team brainstorming together. Niche brands may focus on artistic shots relating to their niche. This will shape the trend of all your images in the future and give future content designers something to work with.
Getting Your Experts Involved
In a world of content creation, there is some serious edge to be gained by using your internal experts. Mix in some top-end pro tips from your company's own engineers, technicians, coordinators, and admins. Ask an artist to take you on a tour of their work or even talk to your drivers about the special concerns of delivering for your industry.
B2B and consumers alike build trust in a brand when they read expert content. Buyers trust a brand when they can see what it's really made of. The best experts to highlight are those who can reveal how customers gain real value from working with your company. Show them through expert-content what experts have to offer in the face of DIY or automated alternatives.
The best way to present your experts will depend on each person and the company culture. You might shoot a video series of interviews or a pro-guided how-to collection. You might turn each expert interview into a blog post or you might even host a live Q & A with experts who are comfortable broadcasting with customers online.
Make the expert knowledge available to your clients as a sign of your entire brand's expertise.
Replicable Brand Elements
On the flip-side of using your unique talent to build the website, also consider brand elements that can be replicated in the future. Most companies have a rotating team of marketing staff or outsourced providers. For your initial website design, consider how future updates and website re-designs can be easily copied for new pages, tools, and entire modules of your expanding business website.
Choose colours that look good with diverse future elements and photos. Choose a design that is simple and could be remade with many tools and for many types of assets. Keep the assets you used originally so that new pages can easily be made in the future. To this end, your web designers often advise keeping your designs simple and modular so that it will look good for years, not just the first-printing design.
Suiting the Website to Your Business
With all the previous steps taken care of, you can now ensure that your website perfectly suits your company. The website is not just a place for your name and address. It's not just a digital sheet of pictures to make the brand look good. Your website is your company's online venue and it needs to fully reflect that company.
Your website needs to have the features that your clients rely on. It needs to be the home-base of your online community. It is the host for online tools and services that your businesses use to engage with every customer and lead. The design should visually reflect your brand personality. The content should compellingly convey your expertise and passion for providing value to customers. The features should provide customers and leads what they need to make good decisions.
Creating a Unique Branded Website Design
We can help ensure your website perfectly fits the needs, style, and identity of your company. Our web design team specialised in crafting professional e-commerce websites that are both personalised and flexible for future adaptations. We know your website needs to be at the cutting-edge of business web design and ready to expand with your business. Our team can help you build the ideal tech-stack for your server, databases, API integrations, SaaS partnerships, and integral website security.
When you work with professional website designers, you can rest assured that every aspect of your business will be explored. From the company colours to your driving central purpose, we'll make sure that your customers know they are in the right place from click-one. Contact us today to begin consulting on your business website plans.
