It’s all about the brand
Part 2 of a series: how to choose your perfect website designer
It all starts with your brand, so tell me again: what is that exactly?
Right off, your web designer will want to understand your brand. This is fundamental to your website (and all your marketing) because every decision that is made about your site flows from its brand.
So clearly communicating that to your vendor is critical.
But… while everyone, it seems, talks about branding…it’s meaning is not so obvious. What is a brand exactly?
Are you thinking that a brand consists of a stylish logo and your site’s color palette?
Sure, those things matter.. quite a lot. But they are the end product, they derive from your brand story. Your branding however goes deeper than those items. It is the image or idea that people have in their mind when they think about your business, your service, your art, your product.
To put it another way, your brand embodies the personality of your site. Are you welcoming, authoritative, whimsical, edgy, experienced…? Now you’re getting closer to capturing the essence of your story.
Once a brand is in place, everything on your site flows from it: yes, logo and color palette, but also taglines, page design, messaging, visuals, written content, and the ever elusive, but very real, voice and tone of your marketing.
Here are two brands which promote exactly the same thing: bottled water. But Evian long wanted to make you feel young and free, with its slogan #liveYoung, using edgy images like this of model Luka Sabat. (Evian has changed its image somewhat this year, but that’s a future conversation).
Fiji Water by contrast is healthy, pure, and natural, this year—2021– splashing its signature hibiscus flower all over its label. It’s exotic, it’s pure, it’s serious.
Same stuff, but an entirely different feeling. (Could it be that their target audiences are different?).
If you have created a solid brand—and we mean a formal, written brand story—then great. You are all ready to tell it to your website builder.
If not, you are not alone, because in our experience few small companies have put more than superficial thought and pure instinct into branding.
How much more? Here is where it gets interesting, because the effort that you put into branding depends on who you are. Brands are rooted in a business strategy: your goals, your plan, your audience. A brand captures your unique value, what makes you different.
For a startup, your brand story is simple, open ended. It resists overthinking. That’s because by nature, for a startup, strategy is just coming into focus. It simply doesn’t pay to overspend in time and money on branding.
Startups are by their nature just figuring these things out: exploring, innovating, pivoting, and being flexible.
Still, for startups and some smaller businesses, your brand story plays a critical, magnetic role.
It’s entirely possible to create that brand story simply, with your own creativity and some help from friends on the web. Here is a fine how-to article on branding by the e-commerce platform Shopify.
This article, by Saskia Ketz are in Fast Company offers some important ideas for startups in particular:
But for companies that have at least some traction, some sales, discovering your branding story is all-important. Those sales do you ride from a brand, whether that brand is articulated formally or not. For a website that delivers results, it is crucial to dig deeper into branding.
If you have people with a marketing background in the house, now is the time to unleash those skills. If not, quality branding agencies can guide you through the process, and are well worth the expense.
What expense is that? The agency Worst Of All Design, a branding resource worth considering in its own right, has published this guide to costs.
Whether DIY, or created with strategic guidance, your brand is the foundation for your site.
Our next posts in this series will walk you through practical steps in managing the build of a website. You will see that at each step, a simple question is posed: how do I implement this step in a way that promotes my brand?
Interested in digging deeper? Talk to an expert.