What Your Website Should Say About Your Brand

In the world of online marketing, first impressions are everything. Many customers, especially those looking for products or services to order directly from your website in the moment they enter the site, will not bother with a website that is hard on the eyes, hard to navigate, hard to read, or doesn’t feel legitimate. This is why advertising agencies employ website designers (and why successful web designers make the big bucks). Creating a web browsing experience that will make customers happy and bring in more of their friends is important business. Despite what we were taught in elementary school, to “never judge a book by its cover,” we all still judge books by covers, movies by their posters, and brands by their websites. This often happens subconsciously. We make quick decisions about things based on their appearance, and these decisions leave us with impressions that are very difficult to shake.

This is why your website needs three things to create a good first impression with visitors:

• Easy Navigation
• Appealing Design
• Trustworthy Feel

Easy navigation is extremely important. The last thing you want customers to think of when they think about your brand is how difficult it was to learn about your products or services and order them on your website. I still don’t bother with brands that I have had bad website navigation experiences with, even those who have since upgraded or redesigned their websites. Ad agencies the world over constantly remind their clients that the content of their business websites could be written by Malcolm Gladwell himself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that customers will have a positive association with your brand, especially if they can’t find where your products are and they can’t figure out how to order them or communicate with you.

If your website looks like it was created by a teenager living in 1998, your customers aren’t going to stay there long enough to learn about your brand and buy your products or services. This is why expert graphic designers need to help you match the positive aspects and good feelings associated with your brand with your business website. One part of building a brand is creating a logo to go with it—to represent your brand with a simple picture people will remember and associate positive feelings with. Your website has to feature your logo, of course, but it can’t be in an overbearing or garish way. Ask a graphic designer more about the art of balancing these factors on a website.

Creating a trustworthy feel is tricky. In short, your website has to “feel” like a legitimate site that won’t infect personal computers with viruses you would find on torrent sites or pop-ups offering you a free vacation. Building a trustworthy feel on a website that represents the integrity of your brand is an art unto itself—based on the natural flow of the website overall and its ability to draw customers in without being too overbearing.

Finally, a word about mobile optimization. The majority of customers buying products online these days are using their phones to make their purchases. You have to take into account how your website will translate from a desktop or laptop screen to a tiny smart phone screen. It usually pays to have addvertising agencies build or optimize a website just for mobile devices.

So, remember, your website is an opportunity to make a good first impression for your brand. Make sure your website is easy to get around and feels trustworthy and well-designed.

Save

Save