YOUR WEBSITE IS A BRAND: GET IT RIGHT FROM THE START

You may have a stunning orator and visionary for a CEO who wheels in business like a Ford car assembly line. But in the 21^st century face-to-face needs to be complimented with a complimentary online experience.

And this is where branding comes in. A lot of people don’t realise in order to build a brand aligned website; you first need to have an actual brand guideline. You first define your brand, and then wheel in a team of professionals to develop a powerful brand aligned website. If you, as the company fail to communicate your vision, your website will be awful and fail to deliver a clear brand message.

A brand document provides a clear definition of your company brand, it’s personality and visual identity. That means if you are an events company – your brand personality may be defined as vibrant and exciting, with a visual identity of bright colours and playful typography etc. Now once you have this, it defines the tone and style of your website copy (wording), types of images used on your website, as well as colours and the type of template to offer a brand aligned user navigation of your website.

If you don’t have this brand document, you short change your customers. They will have no idea what your unique selling proposition is. And that means they have no idea what makes you unique enough for them to want to buy into what you are offering. So how can you fix this?

GET A GRAPHIC DESIGNER

The genius who creates logos like Nike swooshes and the Coca Cola cursives or the stunning 3 lines of Adidas are graphic designers. They have the gift to visually interpret and create what your company embodies. They will create a clear brand guideline or brand bible. This will include the logo, the colours, typography and its application on stationery, promotional material and even the kinds of images you are to use as a company.

GET A GOOD COPYWRITER

Based on the kind of brand you want your company to embody, you also need to ensure how you communicate it in wording is synchronized. If your brand is orange and loud, the writing on your website shouldn’t sound like you called a student to the principal’s office. It should be an exciting flow of prose. The professional trained to ensure your communication is consistent and brand aligned is the copywriter. It is a very niche skill to have, you need to find one, to do a great job or your brand will suffer.

GET A COMPLIMENTARY WEBSITE TEMPLATE……

Based on what your brand represents it is essential to develop it on a website template / platform which gives users a unique brand experience as they navigate through your site. You can surf various sites such as themeforest or wix to get some ideas.  Alternatively you can work with a great developer to help you pick a good template.

OR DEVELOP A TEMPLATE YOURSELF

If the existing web template designs don’t work for you, you can always work with a gifted web developer to design it. This will cost you much more than a USD 15 template.

WORK WITH A TALENTED WEB DEVELOPER

A talented web developer is like the chef! They place all the ingredients created by the copywriter, and graphic designer to develop a breathtaking dish of a website.

The greatness of your website first starts with you knowing what your brand embodies and sharing that vision with your graphic designer, copywriter and web developer. If you are unsure your one to two month project will run for 6 months. This ends up costing you time and money and three frustrated professionals. Decisiveness is key, to have great website.