Should your business look like your website?

by | Apr 19, 2017 | Design, Marketing, Websites

“We have been working with a couple of clients on their

branding over the last few weeks and both have a strange link.

Both have had their brand dictated by their website or more

accurately their web designer.”

Paul Rand

Paul Rand

Designer

“The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.”

Now don’t get me wrong

We have been working with a couple of clients on their branding over the last few weeks and both have a strange link. Both have had their brand dictated by their website or more accurately their web designer. Now don’t get me wrong, we work with some great web designers but the thing about them is that they recognise that their websites are built around a well designed, well defined brand identity that is created by a brand identity specialist to capture the uniqueness of their clients. And that’s all before they start building your shiny high performance website.

Your Brand Identity is about you and how you are different or unique compared to the others in your particular market place.

PAgeSpeed Graphic

“We don’t just sell websites, we create websites that SELL.”

Dr. Christopher Dayagdag

Time to reflect.

Let’s reflect on this as a concept – you have your £1 million house and decide that you need some more space for the important things in life like your full size snooker table, Olympic swimming pool, IMAX Home Cinema and garage space for 12 supercars (it is a concept). Do you go to a builder to design your extension or an Architect who will talk to you about your lifestyle, how you will use your extension and look at all the aspects of planning regulations. Who will then design you a specific layout that meets all your needs. In our industry, we are the Architects where the Web Developer is the Builder.

Time well spent..

We spend a lot of time with our clients to find out about them and what they do, what makes them unique and what we need to portray to their clients. This allows us to build the extensive rules that dictate how they should appear to both their internal and external customers in order to capture that uniqueness. That “them” is then applied to every aspect of their business from printed material, workwear, printed media, advertising and yes their website.

So now we are in the situation where the web developer is able to represent the “them” effectively. Rather than them having a blue logo because the developers favourite WordPress theme defaults to a particular shade of blue or the logo is this shape because it fits nicely into a Facebook profile picture.

“If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand”

 

Howard Schultz, Executive Chairman of Starbucks

Building a Brand Identity needs an investment both in money and time but it is the foundations of your business and how people perceive it. People talk about having a brand and ultimately this is what we all desire. Your Brand Identity sets out the rules of how you are depicted but the Brand comes from the way your customers and the public perceive you, the feelings they have towards you and how they expect to be treated by you. The question is do you want the way people feel about you to be based on a random website design or on a quality Brand Identity that defines what you stand for?

While we are answering questions lets go back to the original one – should your business look like your website? No, your website should look like your business. Don’t put the cart before the Horse. Speak to us and we will help you get things done in the right order and maximise what your business stands for. Remember you only get one chance at a first impression… don’t blow it!

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