Web Design For Branding
When you click on a website, the company’s brand should be clear from the first second it loads. Every page should look considered, be up to date, and have plenty of engaging content that sells the products and services.
With over a billion websites currently on the internet, your potential customers need to be encouraged to stick around. Even if they are already familiar with what you do, you should still give them access to more information, with your website branding as clear and memorable as it should be.
Web design services should always have your brand in mind. If not, your website will look generic, and you or your designer will have to spend a long time adjusting it to suit you, or possibly even start again from scratch.
What is Branding in Web Design?
Branding is about much more than just visuals. Many businesses invest heavily in colour schemes, logos, and matching merchandise without understanding what ‘branding’ really means.
That’s not to say that visuals aren’t important, far from it. On your website, you want a strong visual theme throughout, one that suits you and your industry. Even minimalist web design can be eye-catching if you do it right.
But while first impressions are important, looks aren’t everything; for a brand to be successful it should look great but have real depth to it as well.
So what do we mean by ‘depth’?
Your brand needs to send a message. This message includes what you do, how you do it, and why people should choose you over your competitors. This can be done in a number of ways, from the visuals on your website and the formality of the content, to how many pictures you have on your about page and what your team are wearing in your videos.
A web design agency like ours understands the importance of website branding and will make sure it’s at the core of every page.
Building a Brand into a Website
Your website is the biggest blank canvas you can paint your brand onto. You may be a regular eventgoer, or your office has an open-door policy for anyone who wants to learn more, but neither of these can hold a candle to the traffic your website will experience.
Nowhere else will people be able to learn as much about what you do, so it’s vital that your brand is front and centre. For example, if you’re a law firm that specialises in helping people with bankruptcy, bright colours and chatty content will look out of place and sound jarring to visitors.
It doesn’t need to be too formal, often this is a trap that law firms and similar businesses fall into. Too much formality and the website will become less engaging –important legal information doesn’t have to be dull!
Your brand should be very professional, but with a touch of humanity. Think of how you’d like to speak with a lawyer in person, that should come across on their website. It’s a delicate balance, one that takes a professional eye to find for some clients.
On the other hand, marketing for care homes requires a different approach. Encouraging a loved one to move into care isn’t easy, it takes a lot of reassurance and positive thinking. When you show them pictures and videos from a care home’s website, it should capture this, showing happy faces living a good life while receiving the best care possible. The brand should represent this, using positive language and including plenty of testimonials from residents and their families to back it up. A few warm colours and plenty of images will help sell it too.
As a final example, a marketing company like ours can be bold, as that’s nothing new in our industry. We’re creative people, something at the heart of our brand, so we use bright visuals and natural, human content, alongside plenty of high-quality images and videos. This tells you at a glance that we understand marketing and that our services will help you stand out from the crowd.
Brand-Focused Web Design Services
So how do you incorporate branding into your website? It may be a blank canvas, but it’s on you to provide the right colour of paint. A web design agency may have created hundreds of sites for their clients, but these sites only work if they understand the business they’re making it for.
We make sure to understand our clients’ brand before we begin designing a website for them. This involves meeting with them and their team to understand their business goals and what makes them special.
In many cases, we meet with a business owner and ask them about their brand, but they struggle to give a clear answer. If this is the case, our marketing and branding services come into play. They’ll always have a brand; they just aren’t using it to its full potential or simply need to spend time understanding what makes their company unique. In some cases not understanding their brand has left them unfocused or off-track compared to how they used to be. A new website is a great way to start using your brand to the fullest again.
Making the Most out of your Website
Once your website has been redesigned and is up and running, you should never just leave it to gather dust. You’re proud of your brand, and want to get it out there, so this is the time to push your website to drive enquiries.
There are a number of ways to do this. A strong social media presence will help to funnel people towards your site whenever they want to find out more. Investing in SEO will help you to appear in more searches, and this can go hand in hand with new content you create for your site.
When you have a shiny new site, you need to keep adding new content and adjusting any that’s already there. This keeps things fresh for returning visitors and provides up-to-date information for new ones.
We don’t just provide you with creative website design ideas. Everything is packaged together with marketing in mind, so that we’ll help you boost your brand and keep it working well for as long as you need the support.
We create bespoke marketing campaigns that complement your brand and that we know will work well in your industry. This is why we stress the importance of learning about you and what you do. With decades of experience in marketing, we’ve helped a wide range of businesses in dozens of sectors, but all have different goals and approaches that factor into their branding. So by working with you, the final product is always as good as it can be.