Building a brand has never been so important. A brand can separate you from your competition by giving you an identity.
Making a name for yourself is a difficult task when there are millions of businesses in almost every industry fighting for website traffic.
To further understand what building a brand is, here is a list of components that make a brand.
Logo
A logo is only a small part of a brand but arguably one of the most important parts. A logo is one of the first parts of your brand people will see so it must look professional and modern.
Logos will be on everything, from websites to newsletters, mailouts and business cards so it is important to get it right.
Your branding should look cohesive and consistent and suit well with what you’re pitching. Make it relatable to your business and easily identifiable, so that when people see it, they know it is you without having to read anything!
Colours and Typography
Colours and Typography are more flexible compared to Logos, there isn’t industry-specific typography or colour. What is important however is that it suits the overall theme of your website.
Typography and colours should also be readable for all eyesights, so keep you font-sizes between 16px & 20px and don’t pick fonts that are tacky or write in italics for every part of your Copywrite. You want to keep your typography consistent.
You can use multiple fonts on a website but don’t overdo it! Try to find a pair of fonts that match well with each other, for example, we use PT Sans with Open Sans, these two fonts are very similar but PT Sans has some sass making it perfect for our headers!
Consistency
Make sure everything is intuitive and consistent. There are a lot of websites on the internet which look great but the features and design just do not look consistent at all. Often you find this problem with WordPress websites.
Installing a theme is a fantastic way to save time, however, as is inevitable with WordPress you’ll need to install plugins. Not every theme redesigns plugin components and often the plugins take styling into their own hands.
A plugin that styles itself will be completely different to the theme templates design. This can make your website look extremely unprofessional and clunky with lots of parts sandwiched together.
Whilst a working website is fantastic, it is sort of useless if it doesn’t show off your brand and has inconsistent parts.
Language and Emotion
Depending on the industry you are part of, you’ll need to portray yourself in a certain way. There is a lot of difference in writing between a website selling fluffy slippers compared to a website selling professional solicitor services. Keep your copywrite clean and consistent throughout the site. If you’re going to voice yourself professionally, make sure that is also in your automated emails, newsletters, all website pages and business cards, as well as offline.
To keep a great brand you can also incorporate stories. Nothing makes a brand more unique than a story about how it started. It allows people to feel something, even move them and allows them to feel proud to be part of the journey!