Websites 101: How to build your brand into your website

Products attract buyers. Pricing informs their decision. But brands are what turn shoppers and Google searchers into loyal customers. 

Today, your website is often the first experience customers will have of your brand. So how do you use your website to convey your unique, consistent messaging, and turn casual browsers into lifelong followers? 

Let’s start by defining your brand. Your brand is what’s at the forefront of your customers’ minds when they think of your business or product. It’s made out of (but not limited to) your: 

• Logo
• Brand story
• Reputation 
• Wider design visuals  
• Fonts 
• Principles 
• Practices
• Customer experience.  

Harnessing these mostly intangible things is never simple. Here are 3 ways you can align the look, feel and experience of your website with your core brand personality. 

• The key to a strong brand is consistency. Make sure your design intent is present at every touchpoint. Fonts should be established, limited to 1-2, and used for every piece of text. Your social feeds should be clearly linked. Your imagery – whether photography or illustration – should have consistent style and formatting. Something that’s often forgotten is the ‘site icon’ – the little icon that appears in your Chrome or Safari tab. If you have a WordPress website, the default will be the WordPress ‘W’. Small touches like this reinforce your brand and elevate your aesthetic. 
• Make use of white space. The most effective modern websites tend to be minimal. White space (or blank space) doesn’t just allow your visuals to breathe, it actually improves reader comprehension by 20%. Too many words or images will overwhelm your visitor. Distil your messaging, keep word counts low, and use a few large images as opposed to lots of smaller ones.
• Choose your colours wisely. Colours play a huge role in how we respond to brands. Each one evokes a different emotion. It’s a field of study that’s too big to cover in this article, but you can read more about it here. Essentially, make sure your colours correspond to how you want your viewer to feel, and keep them limited to 2-3. Some examples include McDonalds and KFC which use red because it’s associated with hunger. Hospitals use blues and greens for a calming effect. And ‘drunk tank pink’ is a really interesting example – a certain shade of pastel pink that’s used in US holding cells to reduce prisoner violence. 
• Make it easy for your visitors to get where you want them. For most websites, this is going to be the ‘check out’ page. In some cases, it might be the subscription form. This is the underlying principle of user experience or ‘UX’ – getting your customers where you want them to be should be completely free of obstacles and confusion. A few ways to do this is to use pop-ups and Call To Action (CTA) buttons. Pop-ups offering discounts or prompting visitors to sign up should be limited to avoid annoyance. CTA buttons should be dotted conveniently around your site, ready to take your viewers straight to the buying page.

Although anyone can learn to build a website in WordPress or Squarespace, a professional eye is often needed to set your brand apart from the seas of DIY sites. Furthermore, although it’s relatively simple to learn, it’s also extremely time consuming.

For a helping hand in building an on-brand, polished looking website, speak to us at Slice of Pie.