Web design, believe it or not, is much more than the elements that visitors are actually able to see. The design of a website has a significant impact on many elements of your business. This is because of the fact that an online presence is one of the more important things that a business needs to keep in mind. If you take consistent business branding seriously, you will be helping to keep your visitors happy.
Consistent business branding creates a familiarity between your brand and website, one that allows users and customers to feel more comfortable with doing business with you. This is because your business will become to look and feel more ‘legit’. It will also make it easier for you to create a distinct ‘personality’ for your brand.
When we talk about design being associated with both a ‘real’ world and digital presence, it is important to understand that when we talk about consistent business branding, we are talking about colours, logos, fonts, your brand message… and it all has to be the same, be consistent, between your online and physical business branding.
The more consistent your brand is, the easier it is going to be for you to build trust for your brand. Why? It’s because people search for companies that they can rely on. As mentioned already, consistent business branding is not just about the visual elements of your website or your bricks and mortar location, it is also about making sure that there is a comfortable interaction between customer, brand and website.
The importance of consistent business branding
Business brand consistency also includes all of your methods of expression, such as video or image content, that will affect how people form opinions about your brand and whether those opinions will be positive or not. Of course, the overall brand consistency is going to depend on the consistency of your messaging, what do you offer exactly, and design.
In the digital world, creating and publishing web content is relatively easy. An idea is very quickly developed from concept to finished product. When it is this easy, is it really all that surprising that lots of brands fail to check for consistency, while some others simply ignore it in favour of speed and getting content ‘out there’.
Your business should not allow itself to fall prey to quantity over quality. There shouldn’t be any variation in things like presentation or interpretation. Any brand that keeps changing is not going to build trust, nor is it going to be perceived as reliable. Large brands rarely change their branding, and that’s because they know how potentially damaging that can be.
Consistency becomes especially crucial when it comes to web design, given just how central the internet to people’s lives the internet has become. Firstly, working toward consistent business branding, make sure that the basics like nav icons, images etc. are in the same place on each page of your website. This way, your site visitors will not be wasting time trying to work out something as simple as how to use your website.
In addition to this, consistent business branding can actually help to lower costs. With a consistent layout, developers can get to work with pre-existing templates meaning that new ones don’t have to be created. This cuts development time, which in turn cuts your costs. The first thing that should be taken care of is the colour scheme – make sure that it is consistent with headers, footers, logos, the background etc.
1. Branding
The single most important thing is to make a crystal-clear connection between your brand’s message, its name and the logo that you are using. This type of connection is extremely helpful. It can even help where the brand name has zero to do with the product being sold. For example, nobody would reasonably connect the name of a planet with a chocolate bar, would they? It does, however, become that much more memorable.
Reinforcing connections between very different elements show to visitors that the details matter to you and this, in turn, makes your look more trustworthy in the eyes of the customer.
2. User interface & User experience
These two aspects of the design have many features of their own, but the main goal that the majority of designers wish to achieve is a sense of predictability and convenience. Take buttons, as an example. Buttons should be immediately recognisable as being buttons, they should also be actually clickable. Not only should they be usable and identifiable, but they should also look and act the same way on all of your pages.
In this way, site visitors will very quickly get used to how your website works, and they will be able to enjoy a relatively seamless experience without distraction. Consistent business branding such as this is well worth investing in.
3. Information communication
It is also very important to keep consistency in mind when it comes to communicating information to site visitors and customers. Your users are going to find it very difficult to find the information that they need if it has been placed in random places around your website. You should be aiming to keep things as simple as possible.
Care should also be taken with font elements such as bold and italics. These can very easily lead to distraction, so be sure that such text is on the same level of importance. Another way to draw attention to a certain piece of text is by using a larger font. That being said, you should take care here too so as not to create confusion with too many sub-headers.
4. Messaging
The right colours and striking logos are important in making your branding visually appealing, however, it is also very important to consider the message of your brand and how it contributes to constructing a strong and consistent business branding. Very often brands will leverage websites to demonstrate how their services or products are superior.
While the above is true, and it is advantageous to demonstrate expertise and accomplishments, it is also true that you don’t neglect the other way you can leverage your website to get your message across: by using it to explain to potential new customers just how you can them too.
5. Logical flow of consistent business branding
The logical flow of design is also something you need to be keeping in mind. For instance, if you have a medium-sized image in the middle of a page and you follow on from there with, say, a 60-word description, then logical design flow would dictate that you do the same with the next image.
Visitors will very quickly pick up on the logical flow of the content, making it easier for them to read and to understand. Logical flow is in use on the sites of all major brands, as they tend to follow best design practices to make things easier for people to move from browsing to purchasing.
In conclusion
Consistent business branding allows visitors to feel more familiar with your brand and your website. Consistency across platforms also helps in the exercise of building trust and creating an image of a brand of being reliable. Web design, done consistently, serves several other purposes including helping to cut costs and make the entire visitation process more convenient for your customers.