Website Design and Branding Your Company

Branding your company is as important online, just as much as it is in the real world. If you are thinking about professional website design; make sure that your business is branded correctly. 

When customers pull up your website, you want them to instantly recognize what you are selling and who is selling it.  Branding is used for any type of business from hospitals to clothing companies. Creating your brand may seem easy, but there are some key things you should consider. Your branding should identify your business or product and be easy to recognize. Start your website design with with the basics of branding in choosing the right color and a logo. 

Let’s start with one the hardest challenges, choosing your colors and developing a logo to brand your business. In building and fixing websites, I have seen some ugly colors chosen for websites. Pick a color that you can align your whole business or product image with. Something that may look good to you may not look good to your potential website visitors and customers. There is a whole psychology about marketing and colors, but I will keep it simple. 

Blue is usually a safe color and tends to mean trustworthy and dependable; while yellow is the happy color! Now you can delve into the psychology of color on your own. You can dig deep and even choose a color based on your target audience. In a study by Joe Hallock, it shows a basic color preference by gender. Females preferred blue by 35% and then followed by purple and green. Men preferred blue by 57% then followed by green, black, and so on.

Does color really matter in website design and branding? It matters to have something that grabs potential customers. When it boils down to it, choose a color not just for your eyes, but your website's potential viewers. If you have a law firm that practices criminal law, you are not going to want to choose yellow, but a color like black which tends to give off power. Another color for legal services is grey for authority. 

Nike, Starbucks, and Facebook have one thing in common; you know what their product is without their company name. Although you may not ever have the success of these companies, they are good examples. Their logos are clean designs with simple images that your brain recognizes. Now your business may never be as big as Nike or Starbucks, but it shouldn’t stop you from branding your company. The best logo designs are clean and don’t have intricate details.

Assuming you already have a business name and have now chosen your colors and developed a logo; put it in play. Make sure everything that you have online matched from social media accounts, blogs and of course your website. Make sure that every time an email is sent out from your company that it contains your website, logo, contact, and address. People don’t realize that even an email can be a lost online marketing opportunity.