Ready to Work on Your Web Design, Do These 4 Things First
Start here. A good-looking website is the easy part. For most visitors your site is the first thing they see of your business, so what sits on those pages has to carry your personality and your brand identity. Otherwise it is decoration.
Your brand identity is made of several pieces, and the logo is only one of them. Your business name is in there, along with your tagline, your typography, your brand colors, and your brand voice.
A solid brand identity can guide you into putting together a web design that is not only remarkable but also helpful in establishing your reputation and credibility.
This leads us to the next question: how do you create a brand identity?
What to Do Before You Create Your Web Design
1) Work on Your Brand Story
Your graphic designers will be primarily responsible for developing the brand identity for your business, but they need a brand story to refer to as they work their magic.
A brand story starts with the why behind what you do. From there you need a clear read on your product, the people you are selling to, the competitors working the same market, and the wider trends that bear on your business.
This will help you create a short, but sweet sentence that can summarize you and what you stand for.
2) Work on Your Style Guide and Brand Elements
Now that you have your brand story done, it’s time to work with your graphic designers to compile a style guide and identify the brand elements. These materials will serve as the reference of anyone and everyone who works with your website design and other digital marketing materials to ensure consistency.
Allow your design team to do what they’re good at, but stay involved throughout the whole process to ensure that the team is indeed following the brand story you have previously crafted.
3) Develop Your Website Content
Your web design isn’t the only thing that visitors will see on your website. They will also read your copies and see the images you have included there.
Take the brand story back to your content team and have them build every piece from it. That means the written content for your homepage and landing pages, the copy in between, the menu labels, and the images. Get the photos shot professionally, and check each one against the brand identity you just put on paper.
4) Work on Your Website Design (At Last!)
With the style guide done and the content written, the build starts. Your UX and web designer take the first pass at the design and the wireframes, and you sign off on those before anything else moves. Then development starts. After that comes another round of testing and approvals, and then another, until the site is one you are happy to put your name on.
Conclusion
Designing a site is the fun part, which is why people skip ahead to it. Rush, and you end up with a design that does not look like your brand and does not hold together from page to page. Sort out the brand identity first and the design goes faster, and the build after it goes faster too. You also end up with a site your customers like and remember.
Want to impress your customers with a great website but lack the in-house expertise? We’ve got you covered! We will be glad to provide you with excellent web design in Anchorage that can take your business to the next level. Get in touch with us if you think it’s time for something new!
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