How To Create The Perfect Branded Website
The world is increasingly going digital, and creating a website for your brand or business is no longer simply an option. If you want to reach a wide demographic and market yourself and your products and services to the world, you need your own website. And when you have a website, you need it to reflect and represent your brand identity. Creating a branded website gives your business a professional identity in the market. It makes your business recognizable and desirable.
So how do you build the perfect branded website for your business? Well, to do that, you need to first understand how to establish a brand and how to build your own website. Then the task that remains is to marry the two!
What is Branding?
Branding is the process by which you distinguish yourself, your business, and your product and services from your competitors and other businesses on the market. Branding is what sets Microsoft apart from Apple or Marvel apart from DC. By creating a brand, you create a distinct identity that can be recognized by consumers in the market. Your brand is essentially your answer to why someone should choose your products or services over someone else’s.
All this makes branding an incredibly important part of the marketing strategy of any business venture.
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Designing a Brand Identity
Designing your brand identity requires you to first understand what kind of brand you want to create. This requires a good amount of thought and research. Researching competitor brands and their marketing and branding practices can give insight into how brands are created and maintained in your industry.
In general, when you are looking to create and define brand identity, these are some of the things you need to consider:
1. Create A Brand Story
Every brand needs a story. Think about how KFC mythologized Colonel Sanders and his life story to create a brand identity for their restaurant chain. People have difficulty connecting with abstract concepts and faceless corporations. Creating a story helps humanize your business in the eyes of the consumer.
Your brand story does not have to be too complicated, but it needs to be thoughtful. Think about your business, the philosophy behind your products and business practices, who you want to serve, and why. This gives you a great base for building your brand story.
2. Design A Logo For Your Brand
Giving your brand a logo is the first step in consolidating your brand identity. Your logo is a visual representation of your brand. It is the first thing people notice when they look at your products, your advertisements, or your offices. It makes your business memorable and recognizable.
A clean and simple yet personable logo is perfect for most businesses. You need to be able to embody your whole brand in a single image with your brand logo.
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3. Think About The Color Story
Colors matter. Different colors evoke different feelings in people’s minds and you can use this for your brand. Bright colors tend to evoke a friendly, fun personality, while cool-toned hues often signal calmness and dependability. Keeping a consistent color palette helps you create a distinctive identity for your brand while conveying certain information.
Think about Barbie’s trademark pink and Intel’s blue. Barbie pink evokes feelings of girlish femininity and playfulness, while Intel’s blue indicates reliability. The color stories also help these brands distinguish themselves from their competitors and maintain their brand identity.
4. Keep It Consistent
Pick a logo, a brand story, and a color palette that works for your business, and then stick to it for as long as it is reasonable. The whole point of brand identity design is to commit your brand to consumer memory. That cannot happen if you keep changing things constantly.
So, keep the color palette consistent across your website and all of your other social media channels and advertisements. You need brand management. Stick to one logo instead of trying out too many things at once. Consistency is key in maintaining brand identity.
Create a consistent brand experience and decide exactly how each element of your design can be modified
Start Building Your Perfect Branded Website
Now that you have a brand identity in place, it’s time to create a branded website design to represent that identity. It is not as complicated as it seems. Designing your own website is one of those things that seems tough, but with the right tools and support, it can be done in a breeze without any advanced technical knowledge.
1. Get A Custom Domain Name
This should be your first step before you even start building your website. Whenever you learn how to make a website, you’ll see that the domain name is the first thing to pay attention to. You can get a custom domain name for your business for as little as a few dollars a year.
Having your own domain name gives your branded website more credibility and authenticity. It also shows that you are willing to spend the extra time, money, and effort on your brand and invest in the little things.
Every branded website needs a custom domain name for the sake of professionalism and legitimacy. Protect your branded website domain with DMARC report.
2. Choose The Right Website Builder
The expense of hiring a professional developer or the lack of advanced web design knowledge often discourages people from setting up their own websites. But website building is really simpler and more automated than one might think. With the proliferance of increasingly advanced yet simple and intuitive website builders on the market, even a layman can create their very own branded website.
What you do need to keep in mind, however, is that not all website builders are created equal. Some are more suited for creating online stores, others offer the best overall toolkit for creative portfolio websites, and there are also options for developing open-source eCommerce platforms. In any case, you must research and figure out the best website builder platform for you and your needs.
3. Choose The Right Website Templates
While most good website builders offer a good deal of flexibility and customizability, the point of a website builder is that you don’t have to start from scratch. This is where templates come in handy. The website template you choose should have the right look and feel for your brand. You want a clean, easy-to-navigate template that communicates your brand identity properly, and getting some inspiration by browsing website design examples is always a good idea.
Also, ensure you get all the functionality and features you need for your business. An eCommerce store needs product inventorying, sales management, and billing features. Similarly, you need extensive gallery options if you are a designer or photography service.
No matter which template you choose, make sure it is fast loading, responsive, and easy to customize. You also need to ensure that your templates are accessible and optimized for desktop and mobile screens.
If your website is representative of your brand, choosing the right template for it is important.
4. Customize Your Website In Accordance With Your Brand
Even with the best templates, you need to customize them to your own specific requirements. You want your branded website to look custom it was specifically made and designed for your brand. For that, you need to customize your website according to your requirements and, even more importantly, according to your brand identity.
Stick to your brand’s color theme and palette, choose fonts that are appropriate for your brand’s look and feel, and select images, logos, and icons with care. Take a look at competitor sites and see what works for them and what you can do better.
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Market Your Website
It is not enough to simply build a website. At the end of the day, what is the point of a branded website that no one knows about and no one visits? You need to make sure to market your website and bring more traffic to it. Digital marketing has become incredibly efficient and versatile in recent years. From content marketing and SEO marketing to social media and email marketing, digital marketing can open up many new opportunities for your business and brand. You can also promote your website and services by cold emailing to increase your chances of getting noticed by prospects.
You want visitors to come to your website so that they can learn more about you and your brand. Your website will be the central point for all your digital marketing strategies.
Key Takeaways
With the right marketing and branding strategy in place, you can turn your website into the perfect representative for you and your business. You need to ensure that you have a consistent, defined, and marketable brand identity in place and that your website is well-equipped and designed to represent that brand identity.
Branding requires time, effort, thought, and strategy. It isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be difficult either. With the right tools at hand, you can create a branded website that can give you excellent long-term results and a great return on your investment.
The article was written by Pixa.com.
