Moonfruit Lounge

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

When you look at websites, you think “it looks stunning”, “I love this!”, “this is actually really easy to use, I’ll bookmark this” or maybe you criticise.

That’s what I thought way back when in 2006. I hadn’t actually had my own website prior to this point, the only websites I saw were for the places I worked or volunteered for. Being in the media industry, and studying media at College, I thought it was high time I got myself onto the web.

With that, I cracked open my laptop, and set to work on Dreamweaver. As lovely as that was, it was a pain having to check every five minutes to see if the website code you had written corresponded to what you wanted the website to look like. I couldn’t design my own website in the end, not with Dreamweaver. So, I got on one of those template sites, downloaded my favourite, and just edited the photos and text with my images.

That was great at the time, but then I discovered Moonfruit! If only I had discovered this excellent service before!

I was quick to set up a free website, just to see how everything worked, and within a couple of weeks, I had my own .moonfruit.com website, it was one of those “I love this!” websites, visitors could visit and check out my work, and editing it was really easy, with the “what you see is what you get” focus on the editing. Pure brilliance.

Then, towards the end of 2008, I thought about setting up my own business, which of course needed its own website, and it was straight back to Moonfruit I went. Christmas Eve, I registered my domain and got started editing my website within minutes. I love all of the features and added extras, including the social features, audio players, and of course the “what you see is what you get” look.

I no longer needed to keep refreshing the site every five minutes to see if it looked how I wanted it, because I knew that wherever I was putting things on the page, that’s how they would appear to users.

As my business is expanding, so is my website, and I make use of all the available features, including the Membership feature which I’m using as a Client Login section, so my clients can catch up on information related to their order. To do this manually, for me anyway, would have taken forever!

It’s fair to say, I’ve had one or two problems, well, they’ve not really been problems, just enquiries, and I have had a brilliant response from the Moonfruit team every time I’ve emailed, they’re true to their word when they say they’ll be back in touch asap, and they’re friendly too!

I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life, and deciding to have Moonfruit as the host of my website was a brilliant one. Fantastic service, brilliant website tools, and lots of Moonfruit loveliness.

Here’s a thanks to Moonfruit, keep up the brilliant work, and I shall be recommending you to family and friends!

Ian Pinnell - http://www.pinnellproductions.co.uk/

There are many things you should do before launching any website, but the main thing that springs to my mind is patience! I often see a lot of people launching their website before it’s anywhere near complete. I know it’s hard to beat temptation because of the excitement of developing your new website, but ultimately your website is there for a reason and that’s to increase sales, promote you’re brand and broaden your market. Launching an unfinished website can have the opposite effect.

You’re website is your online face to represent you as a company or artist so it’s vital customers get a good impression of that when visiting your website, because first impressions count! It’s pretty simple. If your website looks fresh and professional the customer thinks you are fresh and professional. If you have an unfinished website then.... you know the rest!

Colours Scheme

It is important that you get the colour scheme right throughout the website. Here is a useful link to a website that shows you which colours complement each other best. http://www.colorblender.com

Font sizes

Another thing that always catches my eye on a website is the font sizes. Maybe I have issues and am somewhat very picky but little things like this really polish your website off. Try to keep the website universal throughout, so for example title headers 14px and normal text 12px, then add bold to particular things that need to stand out from the rest. There is nothing worse than a website which has huge writing scattered all over in different places and sizes.

Navigation

Filter the website content in the best possible way. Map it out in your head as if you were a visitor and develop the website in an idiot-proof manner. Make sure everything is nice and tight and only one click away if possible. That doesn’t mean put everything on one page but you get my point!

Checkout one of my websites for an example on navigation http://www.elizabethgeorgebridal.co.uk as here you can see how everything relevant is tied together so customers can find exactly what they want without any distractions.

Getting people to your website

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is very important. Maybe not so much for artist websites but certainly for business based websites. People need to be able to find you when typing keywords into Google and the way to do this is to work with Google. Not officially of course but make your website easier to read! Here are a few pointers to help with this.

When logged in you will see “Admin” tab. Click that then go to “Site information” inside you will see the following: Site name column - Moonfruit only allow 50 characters anyway which is perfect. Site keywords - This tag should have no more than 20 words. Anything more will be considered as NOT robot friendly. Site description - This tag shouldn’t contain more than 200 characters. Anything more will be considered as NOT robot friendly. All the above tags need to be relevant to each other and relevant to what content you have on your website (Page content).

Hope this has been a help for you in a way. If you need any further help or suggestions please feel free to contact me on paul@slikkdesign.com / www.slikkdesign.com

Good luck with your website.

Paul Bowen

Creating my first website

I've been a personal trainer by trade for over 6 years now, and for my industry its vital that you have a good website to get business. In my 6 years I had a website that was made and managed by my brother. Which, in the beginning, was good as it was cheap and you had someone you could trust to manage it for you. The problem was that his work increased so that any time I wanted something done to the site it took a few weeks for it to be done, which I wasn't happy with. Around the time that I was looking for a new person to manage my site I was made redundant from the gym I was managing due to the financial climate so I decided from there to become self employed and do everything myself. One issue now was that I could not afford a web designer and my brothers work resulted in him going abroad so that was out the question too.

Moonfruit

My brother emailed me one day recommending me to look up sites where you can build and manage them yourself (something I didn't know existed) so I joined a lot of various sites but found they just didn't do what I wanted them too. A few days later I got another email from my brother telling me about Moonfruit and how it is highly recommended and won various awards so should give that a try. I joined it immediately and will be truthful didn’t like it at first as it takes me a while to get the hang of things. After some practice I realised it did everything I needed so started to create a free site. I liked the site so much and was able to put in absolutely everything I wanted including things my last site didn't have. I then chose to sign up to the lite package as I only wanted to add basic things to my site that you couldn't do when making it for free.

Once completed

The site has now been live a couple of months and to be completely honest I have got more out of this site than I did in the last 5 years of my previous site. It was made site of the day here at Moonfruit and also I’ve got a lot of business from it, as I went through the sites SEO guide to help the website get found on search engines.

I know this may sound like I'm writing an article to get everyone to sign up to Moonfruit, but I’m doing this purely because I never thought for such a low price and by making it myself I could get what I wanted and more. Everyday I am coming up with new ideas what to add to the site and doing that doesn't take long at all. I also like the fact that there’s a friendly community here, as the other web builder sites don't tend to have that so its nice to see sites that others have made here giving ideas on how to improve my own.

There's no way I could write all that and now promote my own site for you to see and if you do like it then any comments I am sure will flatter me :-)

Thank you Moonfruit

Anthony Mayatt, Personal Trainer, Breathe Fitness http://www.breathefitness.uk.com