Top 10 Tips for Branding a Website
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): TomKin Consulting LLC.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020
Web domains, or websites in particular, are the bread and butter of a successful website. If you’re attempting to impart information, then an approachable aesthetic, copy, and feel to the website is a much.
For the aesthetic, the copy, and the feel of a website, there’s plenty to keep in mind. It’s as if an infinite array of particulars. There are, however, best practices. Those practices or principles to help make a better website in terms of its online branding.
Tip 1: The Big Picture
The most important part of an online branding is knowing what you want to do. If ou have an idea of what you want to do, then you have an idea as to what picture you want to paint. A portrait of the business as it is.
Something worthy of your business and your name. The big picture is simply trying to take the overall picture in mind and then using this as a vision for the website and its online branding as a whole. It’s the skeletal black and white markings more than anything.
With the big picture, you can achieve a lot more, and faster. You will be able to know if, and when, you’re going off track. This is a tip about sensibility. If you have a frame to the picture, you’ll know when you’re in it rather than veering off to staring at the wall.
Tip 2: The Pathway
This is more a reference to having a general plan of action of anything. In that, you’ll have a sense of where you want to go. The big picture simply sets up the mental support structure. It prepares you for what you want to do.
But it doesn’t give you what you’re going to do. Where the big picture puts boundaries on the whole operation, the pathway sets you up for further success. It is stipulating to do x, y, and z on the canvas.
The canvas is merely starting. You’re deciding how you want to approach the masterpiece. It’s something like having a frame around the canvas and the thinking about the necessary elements for the website, in sequence. x follows y follows z. Each leads to the other until completion.
Tip 3: The Platform
To start blogging, or to have a website in general, in either case, you need a website. Something that is capable of hosting the brand. Platforms exist in such a multitude as to boggle the mind. Similarly discombobulating, the number of unsuccessful ones, comparatively.
It’s like the entire market was taken over by a handful of highly aggressive competitors. One of the most favoured is WordPress. For those who wish to simply jump into the market, that’s probably the one for you.
It’s startlingly effective, widespread, and simply gets the job done. It will take some getting used to. For those newbies to the online platforms, if you need something more complex, you may want to consider professional help.
Tip 4: The Gambit
Any and every business venture is a gamble. You don’t know if it will be successful or not, in the long term. In that, it’s a gambit. So, you will need to take these tips seriously while playing around.
The idea of failure as a rule rather than the exception in business is crucial. So, the early steps of having a big picture vision of what you want to do is important. Also, the idea of having a general plan or pathway to get there.
Then your getting the right platform to carry this vision to fruition too. If you fail in any of these departments, success is less likely. Failure is more probable. There’s definitely the issue of making a gambit here. But you can make success more likely than not.
Tip 5: The Aesthetic
An online brand is a sensibility in the customer. It’s an experience. Some internalized experience in true customers and potential consumers. If you want a customer to return, become brand loyal, you will be an appropriate aesthetic.
Aesthetic is the visual beauty and appeal of the website and the brand. Is it pleasing to the eye? Is it appealing, more particularly, to the brand target audience itself? Will the color pink fit better for a Harvard audience than a crimson red?
Answer: No. Harvard has a brand. It follows it, as such. So, no amount of deviation will do such a prominent brand any good. Think similarly for yourself, whether big or small, you should focus on the aesthetic to the big picture, in broad terms.
Tip 6: Color of the Big Picture
When you have the skeleton of the big picture, it’s like a black and white highlight reel. It gives the broad strokes. It provides the general ideas. This big picture will require some detailing over time.
This tip is devoted to emphasizing the aesthetic elements of the brand. Everything is a color. Even black and white only, even straight gray shades, these have been colour codings for some brands.
It is insane to some degree. But that’s just me. For some, it seems to work fabulously. You need to know what your audience feels like in its colourings. What colour schemes come to mind when thinking about the target audience for the product or service?
The answers to those kinds of questions. Those will give some sense as to what you need to do in order to be suitable. Every kind of industry has some expected colours. Tree top removal companies will incorporate greens. Construction companies will incorporate greys.
Tip 7: The Copy
What’s your message? How do you make sure the target audience not only trusts you but understands what you’re saying? Your website and online brand will have a tag line, a motto. It’ll have a common theme.
A theme repeated in the vision, mission, and values. All of those things bringing about the message of the values of the company. In order to think about the relevance big picture and the colouring, you can try to reflect this in the copy.
I do not mean making the copy not black-and-white. I mean reflecting the sensibility in the colourings within the copy or the text of the brand and website themselves. These should be crisply suited to the company as if a tailored suit.
Tip 8: The Clarity of the Copy
If you are simply unable to write clear copy, hire the right person, words are livelihood. The sense of an individual brand conveyed in text is important too. You can make the colour fit the big picture and the copy fit both of those.
But you have to speak in the language of the audience. Of course, there are functionally illiterate people and professors of the English language. But this isn’t about better and worse language. This is about suitability.
If you know your audience, then you will know the proper way to address them in the terms of theirs. You will know them. You should comprehend them to such an extent so as to embody their way of speaking. Informally, this can be called the patois of the target audience.
Tip 9: The Feel of the Website
The feel of the website is the end result of the big picture, the pathway, the colouring, the copy, and the clarity of the copy in one. You’re building on everything. It comes to a culmination in the final feel of the website.
This is, in a sense, the detailed version of the aesthetic. How things read and look becomes how they feel, it’s a general sensibility about the brand. As a tip, this is after the work is done. It is taking a step back.
You’re looking at this experientially. How is looking overall? If I were a new customer or a grizzled consumer who knows the company, would I feel refreshed by it? It is all in one bag and makes or breaks the brand.
Tip 10: The Feel of the Brand When Gone
The feel of the brand is simply the take home message. When customers leave a company, there’s always the lingering question: How did they feel? The sense of the overall experience of the customer after they have left the brand or the website with it.
The general idea is to keep the interest of the target audience as long as will need. When they leave, you have given what they needed and then have them move on. If they need the service again, then they will come back.
This is the idea. The feel of the brand is what will keep a business going. That which imbues a company, its brand, its website, with meaning to the customer.
Questions to Consider
What are the things most relevant to a website?
What, fundamentally, is a website for online brands?
How do you give customers the best brand experience possible for them, now?
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
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