“Your website is the center of your digital eco-system, like a brick and mortar location, the experience matters once a customer enters, just as much as the perception they have of you before they walk through the door.”
LELAND DIENO
Creating a consistent web design for your brand is an essential aspect in determining how your audience will perceive and engage with your website. Maintaining a theme to your web design will help establish credibility and trust for your target audience and enhance their overall experience with your brand.
Figuring out just how to establish such a design can be complex, but there are five key essentials for helping your brand develop a polished, consistent web design that are a must.
1. Your Theme
One of the first things you should be considering when working on your web design is your theme. Theme is a basic starting point where you collect what colors, styles, and formatting you are looking to use. This will be the foundation for everything going forward.
Colors
Choosing colors may seem arbitrary, but these will represent your brand online. More than likely, you already have some colors in mind based upon what your brand offers and conveys, or based on its personality. You may have certain colors in your logo, for example, that you might consider to use.
Choose colors that will represent what your brand means, whether fun, playful, or serious and use them consistently throughout your design. Your color choices should be selected with purpose, and not out of randomization. These colors will also help your audience identify your brand, when used consistently, as well– so choose wisely.
It is also important to note that you should select just a few main colors, don’t over do it. You want to keep it simple and recognizable. You should also select secondary tones and shades, in addition to the main. These will compliment your main colors and allow variety from solely using your main colors on everything.
Themes
After choosing your colors, select a theme you will stick to. This will coincide with the brand personality you have formed: serious, fun, minimalistic, and so on. It is important to utilize a consistent, visually appealing, and manageable theme that represents your brand. This will help users identify you and your brand, make it easy to for users to read and interact with, and help set you apart from others.
Your selected theme should be distinguishable to you, while staying visually simple and not over-complex.
Formatting
Formatting should also be kept simple and reliable. You want your users to be able to read your pages with ease. Your most important information should be distinguishable and sorted using categories to make it organized.
You never want your users to have to search for what they’re looking for. This will drive your audience away. Be sure to use simple, sensible formatting that will be used throughout all your pages to remain consistent and easy.
2. Create a Matrix
Your color matrix will become your go-to for your posts, webpages, brochures, and what have you. Your matrix should plot all of your colors and their association with certain moods and events. For example, plot your colors in accordance with how serious that color is, how playful, happy, sad, formal, informal, etc.
This matrix will allow you to be consistent with the mood you deliver with certain topics. This will also help create trust and credibility to your brand. Not to mention, it also will simplify designing new content because you will have a reference of standards to use. This will also help protect your brand image by using consistent standards.
This matrix will layout the colors to use for formal content, fun content, and whatever other topics are relevant to your brand.
3. Your Logo
Just as you create standards for your colors and themes, you need to create standards for your logo. Set clear boundaries for how your logo can be used and altered. Doing so will also build on credibility and control of your brand image.
Decide if your logo will be used in different colors, fonts, boarders, outlines, etc. Keep your logo pristine– don’t stretch, reshape, or alter the form of your logo. You want it to be clearly attributable to your brand, without consumers having to wonder what it is.
Keeping your logo consistent with strict guidelines on how your logo can be altered (colors, fonts, etc.) is crucial for being in charge of your reputation.
4. Images
Images, images, images. While it is very easy to go to a search engine and copy-paste an image into your website, this should never be done. First, there would likely be some serious copyright issues with this. Secondly, you only want to use high quality images in your web design.
Copyright
You can never use images found on a search engine without obtaining the permission of the copyright holder through contacting them. While search engines (such as Google) are not public domain or Creative Commons, you can still access online images without needing permission to use them.
Be certain your image is from a public domain or has the Creative Commons license before using. Read the license and make sure you understand how you are allowed to use the image, as well as proper attribution.
This is very important to creating an effective website. Credible websites do not illegally use others’ images. This is also very important to your brand reputation, for obvious reasons.
High Quality Images
Images should always be high quality for use. The second downfall of copy-paste images is that they are often grainy, or otherwise of poor quality. Be very selective in using only quality images, whether the image is bought, used with permission, or your own image.
The images you use should appeal to your brand and users. They don’t want to see poor quality images– it will be detrimental to your credibility. You can do everything right with the colors, themes, and logo, but as soon as your audience sees even remotely low quality images– they’re gone.
5. Tone
Lastly, your tone. Always deliver a tone that is coherent with the type of message your are delivering, as well as consistent with your brand. Don’t alter your tone depending on your own mood.
Building trust is exemplified with your tone, and grammar, so build a reliable tone that your users will expect every time they access your website. If your website is serious, you never want to use slang, for example, as this will be inappropriate. This will dimmish trust, quality, and effectiveness of the website.
These five aspects are not all that goes into web design, but serve as a great foundation. Having a consistent theme, a color matrix to develop standards, guidelines for your logo, understanding high quality images, and delivering an appropriate tone are the backbone of building effective, polished websites.
Be sure to stay tuned for the next post on understanding coding for your website!
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