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Why Your Website Needs a Personality Makeover Now

Brand Branding Advertising Trademark Marketing Concept

Having extensive experience in digital marketing, we understand the importance of creating a strong brand. Whether it’s for a company or a personal brand, having a cohesive and consistent image can help you stand out in a crowded market. This is especially true when it comes to website design. In today’s digital age, a website is often the first impression a potential customer will have of your brand – and trust us, first impressions matter big time. That’s why it’s essential to make sure your website has a personality that accurately reflects your brand. In this article, we’ll be discussing the importance of brand design for your website and providing tips for creating a strong brand.

What is Brand Design?

Brand design is all about creating a cohesive visual identity that communicates your brand’s values and mission. This includes everything from your logo and color scheme to your font choices and website layout.

One of the key benefits of having a strong brand design is that it can help you stand out from your competition. With so many products and services out there, it’s essential to have a unique and memorable design that sets you apart from your competitors. A strong brand design can also help build trust with your audience. When your website looks professional and polished, it can help establish your brand as a credible and trustworthy source.

Elements of Brand Design

There are several key elements of brand design that you’ll need to consider when designing your website. These include your logo, color scheme, font choices, imagery, and website layout.

Your logo is the most recognizable aspect of your brand, so it’s essential to make sure it accurately represents your brand’s personality. Your logo should be simple, memorable, and easily relate to the products and/or services you offer. It should also be versatile enough to be used across different platforms, such as social media and print materials.

Your color scheme is another crucial aspect of your brand design. Colors can evoke different emotions and communicate different messages, so it’s important to choose colors that accurately reflect your brand’s personality. For example, if your brand is all about luxury and sophistication, you might choose a color scheme that includes bold and attractive colors.

Your font choices are also important when it comes to brand design. Your font should be easy to read and consistent across all of your branding materials. It should also reflect your brand’s personality. For example, if your brand is playful and fun, you might choose an informal and whimsical font.

Impact of Brand Design

Your website’s brand design can have a significant impact on how visitors perceive your brand. A well-designed website can help build trust with your audience and establish your brand as a credible and trustworthy source. On the other hand, a poorly designed website can turn visitors off and make them hesitant to do business with your brand.

One of the key benefits of having a strong brand design is that it can help create a memorable and consistent user experience for your audience. When your website’s design is consistent across all pages, it can help visitors navigate your site more easily and find the information they’re looking for. Consequently, the easier the user experience is, the more likely visitors are to convert to buyers of your products and services.

Tips for Creating a Strong Brand Design

Now that you understand the importance of brand design for your website, let’s discuss some tips for creating a strong brand design.

Creating a Brand Style Guide

One of the key components of creating a strong brand design is creating a brand style guide. Such a guide is a document that outlines your brand’s visual identity and includes things like your logo, color scheme, font choices, imagery, and website layout. Your brand style guide should be a comprehensive document that outlines all of the visual elements that make up your brand.

Understanding Your Target Audience for Brand Design

Another important aspect of creating a strong brand design is understanding your target audience. Your brand’s personality should be tailored to appeal to your audience. For example, if your target audience is young and trendy, you might choose a playful and colorful brand personality. On the other hand, if your target audience is more mature and sophisticated, you might choose a more refined and elegant brand personality.

Importance of Consistency in Brand Design

Consistency is key when it comes to brand design. Your brand’s visual identity should be consistent across all of your branding materials, including your website, social media, and print materials. This helps create a memorable and consistent user experience for your audience.

Common Mistakes in Website Branding

While creating a strong brand design is essential, there are also some common mistakes to avoid. One of the most common mistakes is using too many colors or fonts. This can make your website look cluttered and unprofessional. As a rule of thumb, we recommend no more than 3 colors across your website and other online presence – and one color that will act as the primary color.

Another common mistake is using low-quality images or graphics. This can make your website look cheap and unprofessional, and deter visitors from converting to buyers. For this reason, always choose high-quality images but also keep in mind that you don’t want to host images that will slow down your site and affect its performance.

Measuring the Success of Your Brand Design

Measuring the success of your brand design is essential and honestly, is often something forgotten in the brand design process. One way to measure success is by tracking your website’s analytics such as page views, bounce rate, and time on site. Another way to measure success is by conducting user surveys to gather feedback on your website’s design and ensuring that you’re constantly keeping the user experience aligned with your target audience. During your website design process and brand design, make sure that you define goals that are measurable and realistic.

In Summary

In conclusion, your website’s brand design is essential to creating a strong, cohesive and memorable user experience for your audience. This includes everything from your logo and color scheme to your font choices and website layout. By following the tips outlined in this article, you can create a strong brand design that helps your website get to the next level. So, let’s give your website a personality makeover today!  Be sure to check out our web design and brand identity services.

 About Rewebnovate

We offer quality-driven digital marketing solutions that are customized to our client’s needs and goals. We deeply believe in helping society, from businesses to social influencers, get up to speed with the digital world so they and attain a new level of success, on their terms.

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Overwhelmed in the digital world? Awesome tips for your online store.

e-commerce symbol on a computer keyboard, black friday concept. 3d illustration
e-commerce symbol on a computer keyboard, black friday concept. 3d illustration

Totally.  Running an online store, and all that comes with it, can be overwhelming.  How do you attract potential buyers?  How do I ensure the best possible buying experience?  How can I retain customers so they come keep coming back for more? These are all great questions to ask, and we’ll tackle them one at a time when you’re ready to engage with us.

The good news…here are some great tips to keep in mind, and that we believe we’ll elevate the shopping experience of your new and existing clients.

Brand Identity

Never forget that your brand is of upmost importance – without it, you’re quickly going to lose confidence and trust of any potential clients.  And just like many things in life, first impressions matter!  For that reason, make sure that your logo is sharp, and that it’s well positioned in your homepage.  Why?  Because clients will be able to associate your products and/or services with it – it’ll either trigger a good or bad experience whenever they see it.  As always, we are here to help.  Check out our brand identity services to learn how we can help.

Call to Action

 This means that your potential clients should know what’s happening with your online store as soon as they visit it.  For example, are you having a special sale (e.g., 25% off any product) or did you just launch a new product or service you want them to know about?  Be clear on how you want your clients to experience your site and what is easily visible for them to act upon.

Security

 Making sure your site is secure and safe to shop is paramount.  It doesn’t matter how attractive, cool-looking or cost-friendly your product and/or service is, if users don’t feel safe they won’t pay.  End of story.  A way we can help you with is making sure your online store has a SSL certificate, or Secure Sockets Layer, (and basically has a “lock” icon next to the web address in the browser address bar).  All that to say that once such a certificate is in place, it means your online store is as secure as it can be and any data that you enter is safely shared with the website.  And this is crucial as your clients are entering credit card information to make a purchase.

Navigation

This may seem like an easy one, but not always.  In a nutshell, do not make it harder for your shoppers to buy your products and/or services.  Your site navigation (or in other words, menu bar) needs to be easy to find (usually at the top by the logo) and simple.  Don’t clutter your navigation with too much information that will hinder the shopping experience.  A good way to organize products and/ or services is by creating categories, so that users can browse by product or by entire product categories.  Along with that, we highly recommend having a “search” option so that users can easily find products – especially important if you’re selling a bunch of products.

Product Showcase

 Related to the call to action we’ve already mentioned, it’s important to call out featured products, mostly seem in only store homepages.  This will instantly attract users to look at, for example, new products, products on sale, or even a special category of products.  Be sure to reserve a spot in your online store to make such product showcase section prominent.

Discounts, and more discounts

Seriously…who doesn’t love discounts?!  An easy way to entice your potential clients to make a purchase is to give them a discounted price – whether they’re seasonal (e.g., Christmas), a special event (e.g., online store grand opening, or new product launch), or just because.  Feel free to get as creative as possible (hint: adding a pop-up as users first enter your site, or a discount section in your homepage are great choices), but don’t get too carried away as this strategy may backfire.  This means if you’re giving way too many discounts, then users will always expect and not buy knowing that a discount may be coming.  So, find a balance and choose specific periods where it makes sense to have discounts.

Gift Cards

 Another strategy to drive more sales is making gift cards available as a product and/or service.  Simply put, gift cards allow your clients to help sell your products to family and friends!  Also, as with any gift card, this tactic will help your clients not to guess what to gift and better yet, avoid, any future refunds and returns since the receiver is buying exactly what they want.  Need we say more?!

Email Marketing Campaigns

We cannot stress email marketing enough.  Read this: e-mail is not dead and will not be dead anytime soon, if ever!  As a best practice, always reserve a “newsletter sign up” section in your online store homepage – it doesn’t have to be front and center, but visible enough to attempt to collect email addresses.  However, also make it interesting for users to want to sign up – for example, provide them with a 15% discount for their first-time purchase if they sign up.  Once you get a healthy list, then you’ll be able to start creating and sending ongoing newsletter with updates, new product launches, discounted products, sales, etc. to help you make that sale.  A word of caution is not overdo newsletter deployments – no one likes to be spammed and if you end up sending too many emails you’ll end up losing more potential buyers than gaining.  The good news – we can help you with email campaigns.  Check out our web strategy and design services.

Pricing

No one likes surprises, and because of that, be very clear about your pricing model.  Call out costs such as shipping, taxes, and international fees, so that users are clear about their full cost – or else they may abandon their purchase completely and worse yet, never come back.  Another way to be clear of prices, is to provide incentives that may reduce their costs – for example, free shipping in the United States for orders about $50 (which, by the way, can be visible as a banner right above your online store’s header).  Also worth mentioning, be sure it’s clear the currency you’re charging your clients, may it be US dollars, Euros, etc.

Payment Options

Related to pricing, is also to make it easy for shoppers to buy from you and avoid surprises.  The last thing you want as an online store owner is to have your sale abandoned because you can only accept one payment type.  As mentioned earlier on, be sure to avoid surprises and be clear about what type of payments you accept – whether it be Visa, Mastercard, etc.  A good way to make this clear, is to display payment types accepted in the footer of your website.  So, let’s make it easy for you to get paid!

Reviews

 As more users shop online, having your product and/or service reviewed is important.  In fact, a good or bad review can directly influence potential users from making that purchase.  This is logical – would you rather purchase from an online store with constantly good reviews or from an online store selling similar products with constantly bad reviews?  We won’t answer this!  Another point to be made is to leverage email marketing (refer to “Email Marketing Campaigns” section) and encourage shoppers who have previously made a purchase to review the product and/ or service – and give them that extra push by providing them with a discount code after they made the review.  Lastly, make it easy for your users to review products, which is usually one with a 5-start rating next to each product they’ve purchased or thinking about purchasing.

Get Social

In this day and age, having a social media presence is critical to the success of your online presence.  Whether you’re selling products or services, social medial will inevitably create stronger engagement with your target audience.  Yes, this means more work and content generation for you, but it also may very well mean more sales! To help get the word around about your online store is to have social media “share” links next to each product or service you sell so that users can share those to their network.  Also, be sure to have social media icons easily accessible to your potential clients – usually done at the header or footer of your online store, and don’t forget to add them to your newsletters (refer to “Email Marketing Campaigns” section above).  Remember, the goal here is to expand your sales and have your shoppers help YOU sell.  Be as innovative as you like in this space – running social media contests is a great way to engage with your audience (e.g., every user that tags five of their friends in one of your posts will get a 10% discount towards their next purchase).

Checkout

 As we’ve mentioned several times, make it easy to sell.  So, make sure that you have a shopping cart that easily accessible (usually by the menu bar at the header) and this will facilitate your users making that purchase.  Equally important is to make the checkout process simple, simple, and simple!  Do not force users to create an account if they don’t want to, and instead allow them to purchase “as a guest”.  Keep in mind that you can still collect their email by adding an optional “newsletter sign up” checkbox as they’re checking out.  Also, only have data that is important for users to make the purchase – the less information the less likely they will abandon their shopping cars.  Read through the “Cart Abandonment” section below to learn more about tips to potentially salvage that sales!

Cart Abandonment

As an online store owner, you can’t always expect sales to be made just because potential clients are adding products to your website’s shopping cart (although it would be nice).  In fact, and we don’t mean to scare you, the average cart abandonment rate is a little over 68%.  Yikes!  What may lead to such astonishing number is poor usability of your online store and for not properly addressing items that we’re discussing in this article.  Now the good news…you can convert some these cart abandonments into sales.  A good way to do this is through email marketing (refer to “Email Marketing Campaigns” section above) and target users who have not completed their purchases.  Through this method, you can also encourage to close the sale by offering discounts. 

Responsiveness

 We can’t stress this enough, but simply said, your online store must be nicely displayed in any device – may it be a desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile.  In fact e-commerce will get to $845 billion 2022 – and mobile commerce, or m-commerce, will drive almost 50% of those e-commerce sales in 2022!  If this doesn’t get you excited and extra motivation to have your online store be responsive, I don’t know what will!

About YOU

A page that’s is often underestimated is the About Us page. Why?  Because many users like to know who they’re buying from.  Knowing who’s behind the online store, their background and understanding their story may make users at ease when buying from you.  Also worth mentioning is an image of you, or a team photo can go a long way and may just create a “human” connection between you and the user behind the screen.  Lastly, make the story real and genuine – share why your online store exists today and what your mission is.   Read the next section (“Find a Cause”) for additional content you may want to add to this page.

Find a Cause

This means that you’re helping the community – either locally or to a broader region.  Whether you’re passionate about a cause (helping children, environment) or if you want to align a cause to your products and/or services, you’ll certainly increase your clients’ loyalty when they know you’re helping for a cause.  Make this visible in your online store – and the “About Us” page is a great way to share with the world (refer to “About YOU” section above).  Another good way to promote this is during the checkout process (refer to the “Checkout” section above), and by adding a section where users can select how much they want to donate.  How cool is that?!

And finally…Don’t Settle!

And last but not least, don’t settle!  As an online store owner and primary ambassador of your brand, you need to keep on evolving your website – may it be with a new product line, or with a better shopping experience as you learn more about your target audience behavior.

As always, we’re here to help with all of your online store needs.  Let’s have a chat to get started with your online store or take it to the next level.

About Rewebnovate

We offer quality-driven web design, e-commerce, and branding solutions that are customized to our client’s needs and goals. We deeply believe in helping society, from businesses to social influencers, get up to speed with the digital world so they and attain a new level of success, on their terms. Together we’ll create a brand new online presence through our premium service offerings.

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What to do before creating or revamping your online presence.

Discussing web design in office
Discussing web design in office

We get it…doing homework doesn’t always sound that appealing, but it can certainly go a long way. In the web development world, this is certainly the case.

In many instances, we’ve come across situations and a false perception that creating and launching a website is as easy or quick as turning a magical switch (and believe us, we wish we had such a switch!).

From our extensive experience in web development, creating not only content, but a relevant and attractive content, is absolutely one of the most time-consuming tasks when launching your online presence. This means that you have to really think about a good balance of content that won’t bore (or even scare) your target audience while, at the same time, balance it with visually appealing images that make sense. As it has been said before, content is king and picture is worth a 1,000 words.

With that, here are a few things you ought to think about before even engaging with an agency like ours – and of course, we’re here to help you along the way with questions and as your website comes into fruition.

Content Creation

As previously mentioned, you need to create you content. While we don’t provide content creation services yet, there are tons of web content creation services out there (and hey, we may even start offering this in the future or partnering with an agency to make your life even simpler). As you’re creating your content, think about a few things:

  • Target audience – think about who your potential users are, as this is critical to make your content relevant and enticing. Are you targeting a specific user group, region or demographics?
  • Competitors – especially if you’re selling a product or service, make sure that you understand your competitors. Who are they and what’s their competitive advantage? What to their website look like and how are they engaging with their potential clients? Be sure that you do some “stalking” so that you can learn how they work and how they’re positioned in the online market you’re about to embark on. When engaging with us, we’ll also do some competitive research for you, but knowing your competitors will certainly help and go a long way.
  • Don’t beat around the bush – potential visitors have a short time span, and for that reason, make content easy to read, simple and short. In other words, get to the point quick and drive them to a specific set of actions such as, for example, to help drive a purchase of your product
  • Keywords – these are a small set of crucial keywords that will help your website with search engine optimization, or SEO. While you don’t want to get carried away using keywords in every sentence, you do need to plug keywords in your content to help you rank better – search engines love this! And, research for the right keywords is an essential part of finding the right keyword. This is where we can come in and help – check out our web strategy and design services.
  • Think big picture – as you start creating your content, you need to think about your site layout, and, of course, we’ll certainly help you. For example, what pages do you want? Do you want to capture potential client e-mail addresses? What type of experience are you looking for?
  • Brand Identity – your brand is everything…it’s your reputation and it’s what will set you apart from your competitors and, by the way, the reason why customers will come back for more, OR not come back. This means having a logo, and thinking about how you want to brand your web presence is essential to survive in the online world. Also, this means you need to have a consistent color palette and an established typography (think font styles, weights, etc.) on your website so that it doesn’t look like carnival when users come to your website. The good news is that we’ll handle this for you: check out our brand identity services.
  • Responsiveness – everyone, and I mean everyone, is on their mobile devices, may it be their cell phone or tablets. In fact, there are 2022 predictions that at least 50% of all e-commerce sales will come from mobile. For that reason, and especially if you’re planning on launching your online shop, you must think about responsiveness – this means that your website has a great experience whether you’re on a laptop, table, or mobile. When creating content think about the overall user experience, and we’ll take care of the rest.
  • Get Social – these days being social is a must…yes, we mean Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on. Be sure to create your social media presence, and that these profiles are also cross linking with your website. With millions of active users in social platforms, don’t forget that social media is a fantastic avenue not only to engage with clients but also to enable sale opportunities.

Lastly, and to help you through your online journey, download our simple questionnaire so you can think about your long and short term goals. This exercise is great and will go along way! And…you’ll get extra points if you have this questionnaire filled out when you engage with us. Let’s get started.

About Rewebnovate

We offer quality-driven web design, e-commerce, and branding solutions that are customized to our client’s needs and goals. We deeply believe in helping society, from businesses to social influencers, get up to speed with the digital world so they and attain a new level of success, on their terms. Together we’ll create a brand new online presence through our premium service offerings.