Award-winning entrepreneur, speaker and author of Create A Successful Website, Paula Wynne explained to Moonfruit members last month the shortcuts to planning and researching a website.
Today Paula chats about branding a website in her monthly serialisation from her bestselling book, Create A Successful Website.
Day 2: Branding
Build Your Brand
I enjoy the innovative process of creating something from nothing and then branding it with colours, themes, fonts, styles, layouts and everything else that forms a recognisable and profitable online venture. In order to be successful your site will need to punch above its weight and look ‘the business’.
In Philip Kotler’s book, Principles of Marketing, he describes a brand as: “a name, a term, sign, symbol or design or a combination of these, intended to identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors.”
So, how do you create a brand? Your brand will most likely be determined by your audience, either business clients (B2B) or consumer visitors (B2C).
Firstly, you need to ensure your site is not too busy with cheap clip art or graphic images, it should be easy to navigate and should look professional.
Then decide on how you can make an impression that is suitable for your market and the position you want to fill within it. Should your site look clean and smart? Or busy and full? Should it be young and modern or traditional and conventional? Do you want to portray an image of high luxury or good value? The look and feel of these options will be different and guided by your business concept as well as the target audience you aim to attract.
The best looking sites are often clean and simple with a light and airy feel and a spacious design. Avoid heavy and dark backgrounds and overuse of flashy objects. It jars and gets on most people’s nerves. Even with fast speed broadband, they also take so long to download and often people give up before they find the solution you’re offering.
Your Website Brand
When designing your brand, take into account even the little things that matter such as making sure your logo is visible on all your pages. Your logo brands the whole site with your company’s image.
Check out these important brand points:
- Most sites are branded in the header and footer area.
- If you have a slogan or catch phrase, use it with your logo because it helps to reinforce your key message. Don’t think that having this across the whole site will be over the top, it won’t. Instead, repeated exposure through this and other methods is vital to developing a successful brand.
- Be sure to keep all your design elements the same from page to page and from marketing material to marketing campaign.
- A consistent brand gives a powerful stamp of credibility to your online business.
- All of your marketing material should reflect a consistent image and message of your online business.
- What colour schemes will you use and why?
- Your colour scheme and layout should also be recognised across your site.
- Consider which particular colours will go with your brand and research them.
- Decide if you are B2B (business to business), B2C (business to consumer), or both.
- Explore your website’s personality and what ‘language’ to use.
Come up with ways to punch above your weight so you can look bigger than you are – this helps to be classed as a ‘player’ or expert in your field.
There are several different ways you should continue to filter your ‘website image’ through to your audience, all of which will maintain your brand awareness.
Take a look at CREATE A SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE, for clarification on colour schemes, links to find matching colours and colour effects, using white space and looking ‘in’ to a page. You can also find more details on how to stamp your website with oodles of personality. And – the all essential page layout golden rules!

Branding Brief
Create a briefing document to determine how your website’s brand should be used. Large corporate companies spend a vast fortune on their brand documentation and, for obvious reasons, only give certain people the right to manage it. You can do the same on a smaller scale by drawing up a simple Word document starting with your logo at the top, company name and brand objectives. See my book CREATE A SUCCESSFUL WEBSITE, for full guidelines on what should be included in your branding brief.
You should consider using only one font or at the most only one or two similar fonts throughout your website, with different sizes for headers, sub headers and body text. Verdana size 10 – 12 is a safe bet. Only use easy fonts that all browsers can see and read. Once you have decided what they will be, stick to them rigorously and don’t deviate from them.
Summary
Today we set about planting your branding seeds to ensure style, layout and creating a recognisable and trusted brand.
To ensure your site communicates who you are, what product you feature or which service you offer, and what your brand promises, be consistent in design, logo and page content.
Best wishes for your website!
Paula Wynne - Biography
Award-winning entrepreneur, speaker and bestselling author of ‘Create A Successful Website’, Paula Wynne offers practical workshops to help you succeed online. Find out more about Paula at www.paulawynne.com
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