Corporate Branding
When building your brand, you need a website that works with what you offer. The site, especially nowadays, can get eyes on your product, or turn people away.The best way to achieve the former is to consider several aspects of crafting a phenomenal website. While every website has something different to offer, there are several main components that are tried and true. Let’s look at some of them and explain why they’re so effective.
With a good story, you don’t write it once and you’re done with it. Instead, you write multiple drafts. You then see what works, what doesn’t, and make changes if needed. The same applies to a website. You need to create several mockup designs to see what works. A good website designer will send their client several mockups to see what works, what doesn’t, and what could be improved.
A website needs at least five pages for it to succeed. These are:
These are the standard pages. However, depending on the company, there may be more pages needed like portfolio, services, events, etc.
A good website needs imagery. When building a website, you run the risk of losing your customers’ interest if there’s nothing but text.
The logo of the company, images of the founders, and supplementary photos that are relevant should be incorporated into the pages of the site. It’s often useful to use stock photos as a design motif to add depth to the pages of the website.
A company can’t succeed on just their website these days. Having Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other relevant social media profiles is essential. When building a website, it’s important to have all the relevant social media linked on the homepage for the customer to click through to. Some websites might even consider social media feeds embedded directly onto the home page. This can be helpful if you don’t want your customers leaving your main website.
With your brand design, colors and fonts are the foundation and essential components of the style guide informing your site’s overall aesthetic. Certain colors work well with certain industries and can invoke a feeling or emotion you may want to convey to your customers to cultivate their association with your brand. Fonts are the same way. You wouldn’t want your law website to have cutesy Comic Sans, would you?
When designing a website, the designer needs to be experienced with color theory and what fonts work where. It’s not about your favorite colors, but about what contrasts well with what and what messages the colors you use send to a viewer.
Where should the website be hosted? Also, how should you pay for the site? Annually? Monthly? As you may expect, annual payments can be more affordable, but monthly may work if you are unsure if commitment.
Are there any tools or plugins you want? Google Analytics, Call Tracking, MailChimp? This is something else to consider when building your website, as they can enhance your experience. With that said, too many plugins can overwhelm your site builder depending on what site builder you are using for your website.
More people use their phones for browsing than ever before. If you have not optimized your website for mobile, you may need to reconsider. It’s always essential to have your mobile site view ready for people visiting your site from their phones. A good website works equally well on desktop and mobile devices.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, will help to get your website to the top of the search pages in ranking. The best way is to appeal to a particular demographic, which can be a challenge if you’re unsure what the demographic is. It can take research, especially if you’re uncertain about what keywords work best. Stuffing keywords can end up blacklisting your site.
This is something you may want to do some research on, as it’s easy for you to make the wrong moves.
When building the site of your dreams, it’s always important to take it for a test run. Perhaps have a couple of beta testers available to make sure every part is working as well as possible, make sure your buttons and links are all working properly. Your testers may end up finding bugs and other issues you can iron out before the final product is complete. It is always a good idea to have a second, or maybe third, set of eyes on your website project before pushing it live.
Want to get it right the first time? Why not talk to the pros?
With a professional designer, you can send a rough idea of what you want and they can go from there. You’re in control of the process, but the people who design the website are doing the heavy lifting. This leaves you time to work on the other parts of your brand and developing the rest of the departments of your business.
Bell+Ivy is committed to helping people create a website that best represents their brand. We will work with you every step of the way. With our expert designers and your input, we’ll create a site that represents you and your brand in the best way possible. To learn more, check out our services page for more information. Or, you can contact us to schedule a consultation.
